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NASA Satellite Measures Earth's Carbon Metabolism
Roland Piquepaille writes "To celebrate Earth Day, the NASA Earth Observatory recently revealed global measurements of the Earth's metabolism. 'Combining space-based measurements of a range of plant properties collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) with a suite of other satellite and surface-based measurements, NASA scientists produce composite maps of our world's 'net primary production' every 8 days. This new measurement is called net production because it indicates how much carbon dioxide is taken in by vegetation during photosynthesis minus how much is given off during respiration.' Check this column for a summary including the usefulness of such measurements. You'll also find maps showing the seasonal variation of Earth's net primary production."
It just has a low metabolism.
Show where it gets produced contrasted with where it gets consumed and show the rate of the difference. Combine that with charts showing how typical day to day activities contribute to either column. Now you'll have something that can help the average person make a difference! This is a good start!
I am glad to see some useful studies being done. Once a planet warms up enough with green house gases, we can get some plant life on the planet to assist in the creation of oxygen through this same cycle and eventually make a planet liveable. Though it's not something we'll see in our lifetimes, studies such as these benefit the species as a whole in the long run (i.e. big picture of time).
Dr Atkins!
-Oh wait, he died last week... In our hour of need, no less.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
I'm surprised that the coniferous forests in far north North America and Eurasia are more productive than the deciduous forests of more temperate climates. I'm wondering if the results of this are skewed because the temperate regions produce more carbon dioxide in the form of combustion emissions.
If I understand the pictures correctly, it's amazing to see how much carbon is converted in the northern hemisphere... in Canada and Russia. It counters the conventional wisdom of the Amazon as being the primary oxygen producing region.
It will make me doubt all those "save the rain forest" tree-huggers.
I wonder if they could do the same thing to show the amount of carbon being produced.
NASA scientists unveiled the first consistent and continuous global measurements of Webchat's "user metabolism."
/kill's out of the admins of webchat.
Data from the kc and Thunderwoman satellites are helping scientists frequently update maps of the rate at which luser life on Webchat is absorbing abuse and
The rate of luser asphyxiation through ScattKsynthesis is a basic property of life on Webchat of ORG. It is the basis for capturing and storing the energy that fuels their ever growing need for assholish domination. The words they type are a byproduct of this ScattKsynthesis. According to its creators, they are ROOTs and most not listen nor help any luser at anytime without first asking them to perform felatio or in kc's case cunnilingus.
These new net primary productivity maps provide a fascinating new insight into the iron fist connection between the living world and the mental hell that is Webchat of ORG.
Earth, this is crazy talk! You don't look anything like Saturn! Why must you always do this to yourself! I love you for who you are, not your equator diamater! I'm throwing these diet pills away right now!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Just sitting there doing nothing? I mean what have they ever done for us :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
"As you can see, there is a lot of activity in the oceans."
You see, this is the kind of scientist we need. A scientist who isn't afraid to praise performance and give credit where it is due. However, we also need a motivational scientist. You know, the sort who will show these findings to trees and grass and ask them:
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Looks like the northern hemisphere is kicking the southern hemisphere's ass! Northern hemisphere rules!
[me@home me] $ cat heart/mind/wallet
cat: heart/mind/wallet: No such file or directory
hmmmm
Oh, why does it matter? If more carbon is being removed by the carbon cycle than is being released -- we'll run out of carbon dioxide. No plant respiration. No oxygen production.
I'm not trying to be critical here, but I do not completely believe this data. Its given to us in an incredibly misleading way. They are essentially telling us that every square foot of the planet produces more CO2 than O2 which is simply not possible. There's no mapping of negative production, so it looks like we're spiralling out of control.
I'm really surprised no one's started a serious global warming flame. really.
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
it all begins with the /spirit. there used to be a /. spirit, but that's been replaced buy hired goons.
if you don't have an account yet, everything will be more difficult/unreal/fruitless.
So is the Red Good or Bad in this map. I am verry confused. They explain how much carbon is being used by the ocians but that is relively low compared to the land. Wow my head hurts.
It's quite interesting to see how much carbon is being soaked up by the oceans. Much of this carbon eventually ends up as deposits on the sea floor and, after millions of years, limestone. It may be a lower amount of carbon intake than the forests, but then forest fires and biological action on dead trees can eventually release a percentage of the carbon that's trapped by trees.
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Somewhere.. sometime.. i read that the corn fields in southern Ontario Canada produce enough oxygen in their 5 month growing period to aspirate every single canadian for an entire year.. mind you there is only 5 of us up here.. and yes i did know bob that works in accounting.. he's dead..
This whole koyoto accord thing has got this blown way out of proportion though.. plants need co2.. they thrive in a co2 rich environment.. my car is just helping plants live a better life.
Look at those black spots in the ocean! Wouldn't it be great to put some floating islands there and plant lots and lots of trees. And bring up cold water from the deeper layers so that plankton could start growing and feed the fish and the whales. Impossible? Oh well; it was a nice dream.
MODIS Web MODIS and MODIS links
The scale on these diagrams is kg of carbon per square kilometre per year. The values are up to about 3. This seems completely bogus. Think about how much mass a aquare kilometre of trees must gain in one year. It's not all water ...
THere wa san artile a while ago, about how Mt. everest and the mountains around it changed the climate. Basically, sicne its bare rock and limestone, unlike most smaller mountains which have tress, and grass, it basically soaks co2 out of the air by reactin with the carbonic acid in the rain and neutralisning it, and the neutral salts get washed into the ocean where they settle out. WHat i just said may be completely technically wrong, i am not a chemist, but thats more or less the mechanism, new big assed bare rock, acidy rain, co2 goes down.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Do we start burning bed rock instead? What about geotherms from the earth's magma. Why can't we use it (they do in Iceland) as a carbon substitute.
I suggest you read Slashdot
I think I'll go take a shit in the woods, and go piss on a tree. One less "WHOOSH..." down the toilet. Hey, it saves water, and that water could be donated to some squirel or a starving person in Ethiopia or some other equally tree huging manuever! Happy Earth day slashdot!
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
The NH has a lot more land area. They should be in a different conference.
Sean
There were times when eco-nuts blamed burping cows for excess carbon in the form burping and farting methane. This would probably show up as carbon excess in the west US and sourthern south america, if this hypothesis is true. Looks of cows and few trees in those regions.
Earth's surface as a 20 x 25 Megameter rectangle has some old npp numbers from John Harte's "Consider a Spherical Cow". (I would have inlined them here, but I can't seem to do a PRE tag...) Google would no doubt turn up other sources.
ecosystem type area npp
l at_earth.html
:)
(10^12 m^2) (kg(C)/m^2/yr)
.tropical forests 24.5 0.83
temperate forests 12.0 0.56
boreal forests 12.0 0.36
woodland and shrubland 8.0 0.27
savanna 15.0 0.32
grassland 9.0 0.23
tundra and alpine meadow 8.0 0.065
desert scrub 18.0 0.032
rock, ice, and sand 24.0 0.015
cultivated land 14.0 0.29
swamp and marsh 2.0 1.13
lake and stream 2.5 0.23
open ocean 332.0 0.057
upwelling zones 0.4 0.23
continental shelf 26.6 0.16
algal bed and reef 0.6 0.90
estuaries 1.4 0.81
From Harte's "Consider a Spherical Cow" pg257 via
Earth's surface as a 20 x 25 Megameter rectangle
http://www.vendian.org/envelope/dir2/f
Note the npp units. kgC/_square_meter_/yr.
Not per square kilometer.
That would make leaf raking sooo much easier...
And sorted by npp...
kgC/m^2/yr Mm^2
swamp and marsh 1.13 3.6
algal bed and reef 0.90 2.9
tropical forests 0.83 2.6
estuaries 0.81 2.6
temperate forests 0.56 1.8
boreal forests 0.36 1.1
savanna 0.32 1.0
cultivated land 0.29 0.92
woodland and shurbland 0.27 0.86
grassland 0.23 0.73
lake and stream 0.23 0.73
upwelling zones 0.23 0.73
continental shelf 0.16 0.51
tundra and alpine meadow 0.065 0.21
open ocean 0.057 0.18
desert scrub 0.032 0.10
rock, ice, and sand 0.015 0.048
Oops. Ignore the second column of the second table (the one sorted by npp)... it's mislabeled and not useful here. Careless - sorry.
The graphics have been fixed. It is indeed kgC/m^2/yr...
This reminds me of the readings Spock used to make on new planets: "Captain, I show many lifeforms on the small continent."
I typically take the word of the tree-hugger with a grain of salt as it is. Generally environmentalists are very impulse minded. They see something and immediately assume it is a trend.
Is global warming actually occuring? Perhaps. But it is probably more due to a cycle that the planet is experiencing than mankind driving his car to work everyday. We were in an ice age at one time, after all.
The Land NPP algorithm was developed at the NTSG at the University of Montana. I am the Sys Admin for this group.
We developed the software to do the Gross and Net primary productivity calculations (as well as some others), but the main production runs are done at the Goddard Space Flight Center in a room full of SGI Origin servers. Our development environment consists of several smallish linux beowulf clusters (32x1Ghz P3), a few Althon MP boxes, some old AIX dev boxes, and one SGI Oxygen for nasa code certification. Our largest resource is disk space, we have about 12TB of capacity. Keep in mind that this is just for algorithm development and testing. Goddard's production facility is huge, but that's becuase they are producing tons of other data products as well including all the land, ocean, and atmospheric products off of both the Terra and Aqua Satellites. This land productivity data (MOD17 in nasa speak) is derived in part from the MODIS sensor on Terra.
Both of these satellites are in sun syncronous polar orbits meaning that they come down over the earth's day side. This is because many of the sensors (like MODIS) are passive. Terra is the 'AM' satellite, it crosses the equator about mid morning local time, and Aqua being the 'PM' satellite crosses in the afternoon. The reason for this is because there is a significance in AM and PM cloud cover. Cloud cover is difficult to correct for (in fact with MODIS, sometimes you can't correct).
-JungleBoy (aka tweaker)
Melt our server room Axis Camera
Automated GPP Images Site (in devel)
My Lame Website.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Check out the website I work on, .m l)
http://Coastwatch.noaa.gov
(There is a search interface at http://coastwatch.noaa.gov/interface/interface.ht
We do near real time processing of Modis data and a host of other satellites. MODIS is a joint operation between NOAA & NASA.
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." - Sir Winston Churchill
Another strong factor that must play into this is the fact that the Northern America/Eurasia areas have the highest concentration and greatest diversity of coniferous trees anywhere on the globe. Coniferous trees metabolize CO2 all year round because they don't loose their leaves every fall. Because they metabolize all year round they are more productive than temperate deciduous regions.
The author was reading slashdot. :)
[as noted in another post]
Interesting this should make the news on the same day that one of NASAs pork-barreling subcontractors should start swinging the axe. Not quite the exact same project, but earth observation / atmospheric sciences supercomputing sites).
SAIC, An Employee-Owned Company
Date April 23, 2003
To ASDC Employees
From James E Cook
Subject NASAs ASDC Budget Shortfall
NASAs ASDC management team has announced that their FY-03 operating budget has a significant shortfall that will require us to take immediate dramatic steps to reduce our manpower cost. As many of you know we have already lowered on-call, travel and training support to lower our cost to the government, but the latest budget cut cannot be made without lowering manpower cost.
Manpower cost cuts will include: a reduction in force for SAIC and subcontractor's personnel, lowering of part-time labor cost, and reassignment of supervisory personnel.
As unfortunately as these steps are we must take immediate action to mitigate any further negative impacts that delays would create in meeting the cost reductions that NASA's operating budget demands.
Personnel affected by these reductions will be notified prior to the end of this week.
(The question is, how large will the managerial bonus be for this screw up?)
Actually the biggest problem with carbon is that it can be released by methane that is being stored in the ocean. The way to cause that methane to release carbon 12 is by a 4-5 degrees global temperature increase.
All the carbon 12 that is being released could cause an additional 4-5 degrees of temperature increase.
10 degrees of global temperature increase could turn England into a desert. It has been proved that this phenomenon caused a pre-dinosaur extinction of about almost all life on earth. (The Permian Mass Extinction)
Source: Discovery
a big smelly DOUCHE. Why don't you douche yourself you big fucking douche?
All science aside... how about a little props to the SA that set the earthobservatory system up... it was a major pita. A line in the acknowledgements mite be nice ;-> Of course.. that would mean I actually knew what I was doing.
But... I dont understand... Rush Limbaugh tells us that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect...
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.