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UAVs Will Study Californian Smog
Roland Piquepaille writes "The California Energy Commission is funding a research effort named CAPPS, short for California AUAV Air Pollution Profiling Study. CAPPS will use autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs) to gather meteorological data as the aircraft fly through clouds over Southern California. The goal is to study smog and its consequences as well as better understand the sources of air pollution. The first flights started in April 2008 and data collection will continue until January 2009. But read more for additional references and photos of these autonomous unmanned aircraft."
The goal is to study smog and its consequences as well as better understand the sources of air pollution.
Airplanes?
Although I must say, the nested acronyms just about blew my mind.
Are UAVs better for this job then conventional manned aircraft?
UAVs make sense where the flight is into harms way, but this?
"The goal is to study smog and its consequences as well as better understand the sources of air pollution"
<tinfoilhat>
Oh, that's what they say... But let's just see if they don't get used for citizen surveillance as well... If they're already flying there, you know someone in power will ask for it.
</tinfoilhat>
Let the South Park joke begin in 3,2,1...
more crazies seeing UFOs
...So why not study the air pollution in a place where there's more of it?
You have plenty of options.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Our UAV is online!
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Air pollution has been largely eliminated in the US. Our air has been getting cleaner for 40-50 years now and is now extremely clean, despite what you might hear from activist groups and the news media.
Here's a report on the subject.
If UAVs are needed, it's because we've surpassed the point where the air is adequately clean and we need to take ridiculous measures to try to attain perfection. Perfectly clean air is not needed, is not possible, and is certainly not cost-effective for the public.
Good ol' slashdot, always first with the scoop! What month is it again?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Pay no attention to the government aircraft constantly above your heads. They are only there to study smog.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
what about smug ? http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/103216
UAVs Will Study Californians.
For more, see my post here.
IANAM(Meteorologist), but why do they need UAVs? Couldn't they just rig up a series of regular weather balloons?
Big Brother gets it's foot, er wings, in the door yet again with a plausible reason which moves towards totalitarianism. I can't believe that you American's keep falling for that over and over and over again. The next thing you know all your home electronics such as butt plugs will have cameras, microphones, tracking devices along with dna sampling redundantly built in along with mesh wifi to report the data to their google powered data warehouses for full 7x24x366xLifeTime information awareness about you and everyone you ever connect with along with all the content of your conversations. Good luck with that.
That's good, so they can mount the sensors ahead of the engine. Otherwise they might collect data on their own emissions rather than what they are flying thru.
Infuriate left and right
I can just hear them now:
"This is not for researching pollution! They are secretly equipped with spy gadgets to watch everyone! They even have guns to secretly kill people!"
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The smog was fixed by catalytic converts which in turn create Global warming....Wish they would keep their hands off else they really mess thing up
What happens when the smog clears over Los Angeles?
UCLA.
*ba-dum-bum*
After 5 years, and $10 million dollars invested on advanced UAV research, it has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that the smog levels in LA are.... Really Bad.
Eschew Obfuscation
Will they be packing Hellfire missiles to deal with "gross polluters"?
Los Angeles has it good compared to the entire San Joaquin Valley, Fresno in particular.
Walking out of the house at 5:30 in the morning (exercise to beat the heat), one notices that the air smells like someone just lit a firecracker. During the day, the haze is orange-brown and often so dense there is no visibility after half a mile.
The air is so bad, one asthmatic friend of mine who teaches at Fresno State had to move to Santa Cruz. He now commutes twice a week (2.5 hours one way). After his bike rides he'd come home and start hacking blood, the air was that bad.
I'm glad I was only visiting, but Fresno, Los Banos, and all of the infernal SJV has it bad.
Smog is a serious problem. (Not all of it is caused by internal combustion engines. A lot of it also comes from crop dusting the thousands of acres of fertile California Valley soil.)
blog
Do they melt them or burn them to make the smog?
Nice. And they're colorful. Unlike the black ones the police use.
At least now we'll know which ones *not* to shoot down.
Flashback: 1996, new high-efficiency computerized traffic control lights are being installed in Sunnyvale and other major cities. They just happen to use *video cameras* for vehicle detection, instead of burying magnetic induction coils in the asphalt. "But dont worry", city councils were telling citizens all over, "this isnt a surveillance system. It's just to save money, and improve traffic flow." And it wasnt a surveillance system.. until a software upgrade 3 years later. GEE, I NEVER SAW THAT COMING. Then it became "a public safety system, to catch people running red lights. This isnt a surveillance system." Riiiiiiiiight. Few years later, there's some low-key grief over these systems not being *profitable* because *the military contractor that receives all the pictures taken and identifies the license plates via OCR* is charging as much as the red light tickets are worth. So now the military has cameras installed that read license plates, on every major intersection of every major city. And now come flying drones to fill our skies. But dont worry - it's for.. umm ... air quality! Yeah, that's it! Air quality! You care about the air, right? It's not for surveillance. Of COURSE not. What are you, some conspiracy nut?
The report is a hack research paper designed to support a political view, not an serious attempt to understand pollution and how it affects people. It is not science. It is propaganda masquerading as science. Your misunderstanding of pollution is large. Your misunderstanding of health matters is dangerous.
* Weakness in this "report" include:
- It fails to include all data; there are about 100 counties in North Carolina; the report summarizes hospitalization in only 29.
- It aggregates ozone and hospitalization rates for 2 years, rather than correlate daily/weekly patterns of ozone and hospitalization.
- It fails to account for other contributors to asthma (pets, pollen, mold, infection, cigarette smoke, etc)
- It fails to address adult asthma.
- It fails to account for:
a) asthma in children over 14
b) asthma in children which was not severe enough to cause hospitalization
- The graph shows only one county seriously out of line with the average hospitalization rate; Swain county. Swain county is:
a) small enough to yield statistically questionable data
b) lower than the rest of the state in income and education, and
c) higher than the rest of the state in poverty.
If anything, it seems to indicate a correlation between poverty and illness. Hardly a surprise.
- Schwartz's underlying asthma data comes from a report done on children on Medicaid and asthma-related hospitalizations. The original report made no mention of ozone or pollution. The original report also gives the following caveats, which Schwartz made no mention of
"Neither source will produce a reliable indication of the total prevalence of asthma among children."
"Other children on Medicaid with asthma may not have been diagnosed, or may not have had services paid for by Medicaid during the year."
"The hospital discharge data counts only those cases where the complications of asthma were serious enough to warrant one of more overnight hospital stays."
** The tip of this information iceberg can be found:
here
here
here
here
here
or here
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Light aircraft are either VFR or IFR, either way the pilot is responsible to see and avoid other aircraft. UAVs can't do this due to the lack of a pilot, and being much smaller than other aircraft pose a problem to pilots, even if they manage to see one of these, the small size will lead them to think it is much further away than it really is . .
all it will take is one crash caused by these UAVs to bring on the lawsuits and seriously curtail their use . .