It’s official: Australia’s ocean surface was the hottest on record in 2024

Moninya Roughan, UNSW SydneyAustralia’s sea surface temperatures were the warmest on record last year, according to a snapshot of the nation’s climate which underscores the perilous state of the world’s oceans. The Bureau of Meteorology on Thursday released its annual climate statement for 2024 – the official record of temperature, rainfall, water resources, oceans, atmosphere and notable weather. Among its many alarming findings were that sea surface temperatures were hotter than ever around the continent last year: a whopping 0.89°C above average. Oceans cover more than 70% of Earth’s surface, and their warming is gravely concerning. It causes sea levels to rise, coral to bleach and Earth’s ice sheets to melt faster. Hotter oceans also makes weather on land more extreme and damages the marine life which underpins vital ocean ecosystems. What the snapshot showed Australia’s climate varies from year to year. That’s due to natural phenomena such as the El Niño and La Niña climate drivers, as well as human-induced climate change. The bureau confirmed 2024 was Australia’s second-warmest year since national records began in 1910. The national annual average temperature was 1.46°C warmer than the long-term average (1961–90). Heatwaves struck large parts of Australia early in the year, and...

Read More........→February 13, 2025

What’s the difference between climate and weather models? It all comes down to chaos

Nadia Piet/AIxDESIGN & Archival Images of AI / Better Images of AI , CC BY-SA Andy Hogg, Australian National University; Aidan Heerdegen, Australian National University, and Kelsey Druken, Australian National UniversityWeather forecasts help you decide whether to go for a picnic, hang out your washing or ride your bike to work. They also provide warnings for extreme events, and predictions to optimise our power grid. To achieve this, services such as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology use complex mathematical representations of Earth and its atmosphere – weather and climate models. The same software is also used by scientists to predict our future climate in the coming decades or even centuries. These predictions allow us to plan for, or avoid, the impacts of future climate change. Weather and climate models are highly complex. The Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, for example, is comprised of millions of lines of computer code. Without climate and weather models we would be flying blind, both for short-term weather events and for our long-term future. But how do they work – and how are they different? The same physical principles Weather is the short-term behaviour of the atmosphere – the temperature on a given day, the wind, whether it’s raining and how much. Climate is about long-term...

Read More........→February 11, 2025

Not all of nitrogen for plants comes from atmosphere: Study

Davis (California): Contrary to popular belief that all of the nitrogen on Earth available to plants comes from the atmosphere, a study from the University of California, Davis, indicates that more than a quarter comes from Earth's bedrock. Up to 26 percent of the nitrogen in natural ecosystems is sourced from rocks, with the remaining fraction from the atmosphere. This newly identified source of nitrogen could also feed the carbon cycle on land, allowing ecosystems to pull more emissions out of the atmosphere, the study published in the journal Science said. "Our study shows that nitrogen weathering is a globally significant source of nutrition to soils and ecosystems worldwide," said co-lead author Ben Houlton, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Land, Air and Water Resources and director of the UC Davis Muir Institute. "This runs counter the centuries-long paradigm that has laid the foundation for the environmental sciences. We think that this nitrogen may allow forests and grasslands to sequester more fossil fuel CO2 emissions than previously thought." Ecosystems need nitrogen and other nutrients to absorb carbon dioxide pollution, and there is a limited amount of it available from plants and soils. If a large amount of nitrogen comes from rocks, it helps explain how natural ecosystems like boreal forests...

Read More........→July 08, 2020

Researchers develop novel method to turn footsteps into usable electricity

New York: Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed an inexpensive, simple method that allows them to convert footsteps into usable electricity. The method puts to good use a common waste material -- wood pulp. The pulp, which is already a common component of flooring, is partly made of cellulose nanofibers. They are tiny fibers that, when chemically treated, produce an electrical charge when they come in contact with untreated nanofibers. When the nanofibers are embedded within flooring, they are able to produce electricity that can be harnessed to power lights or charge batteries. And because wood pulp is a cheap, abundant and renewable waste product of several industries, flooring that incorporates the new technology could be as affordable as conventional materials. While there are existing similar materials for harnessing footstep energy, they are costly, nonrecyclable, and impractical at a large scale. "We've been working a lot on harvesting energy from human activities. One way is to build something to put on people, and another way is to build something that has constant access to people. The ground is the most-used place," said Xudong Wang, Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The team's method published in the journal Nano Energy is the latest in a green energy...

Read More........→October 22, 2016

Lightning Longer, Stronger and More Extreme

ASU professor Randy Cerveny credits “huge strides in the detection and monitoring of lightning events.”, Credit; Axel Rouvin/Flickr It turns out lightning isn’t always a flash, and an Arizona State University (ASU) researcher says a pair of newly classified records for distance and duration reshaping our views of the electric weather phenomena might be just the beginning. The World Meteorological Organization has recently confirmed that a bolt over Oklahoma in 2007 covered a horizontal distance of nearly 200 miles (321 km), and a streak over southern France in 2012 lasted for nearly 8 seconds. “Our weather technology,” said Cerveny, chief rapporteur of climate and weather extremes for the WMO and instructor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, “particularly with regard to lightning, has advanced rapidly in the last few years to now allow us to detect and measure lightning events that we previously had not been able to monitor and evaluate.” Cerveny said this is the first time lightning has been included in the official WMO extreme weather and climate archive, which is maintained by the organization’s Commission for Climatology and documents details of records for heat, cold, wind speed, rainfall and other related events. Full details of the lightning assessments are given in the online issue of...

Read More........→October 14, 2016

How Did Early Earth Stay Warm?

An artist’s depiction of an ice-covered planet in a distant solar system resembles what the early Earth might have looked like if a mysterious mix of greenhouse gases had not warmed the climate, Credit: ESA A UC Riverside-led astrobiology team discovered that methane, a potent greenhouse gas, was not the climate savior once imagined for the mysterious middle chapter of Earth history For at least a billion years of the distant past, planet Earth should have been frozen over but wasn’t. Scientists thought they knew why, but a new modeling study from the Alternative Earths team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute has fired the lead actor in that long-accepted scenario. Humans worry about greenhouse gases, but between 1.8 billion and 800 million years ago, microscopic ocean dwellers really needed them. The sun was 10 to 15 percent dimmer than it is today—too weak to warm the planet on its own. Earth required a potent mix of heat-trapping gases to keep the oceans liquid and livable. For decades, atmospheric scientists cast methane in the leading role. The thinking was that methane, with 34 times the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide, could have reigned supreme for most of the first 3.5 billion years of Earth history, when oxygen was absent initially and little more than a whiff later on. (Nowadays oxygen is one-fifth...

Read More........→October 03, 2016

NASA video to help ‘see’ sun’s magnetic field

Washington: NASA has created a video to 'see' and understand the sun's invisible magnetic field, that may be crucial for future deep space travel, by combining real time observations and computer simulations to analyse how plasma courses through its corona. The sun is a giant magnetic star, made of material that moves in concert with the laws of electromagnetism. Its magnetic field is responsible for everything from the solar explosions that cause space weather on Earth — such as auroras — to the interplanetary magnetic field and radiation through which our spacecraft journeying around the solar system must travel. “We are not sure exactly where in the sun the magnetic field is created," said Dean Pesnell, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It could be close to the solar surface or deep inside the sun — or over a wide range of depths," Pesnell said. To see these invisible fields, scientists observed the material on the sun. The sun is made of plasma, a gas-like state of matter in which electrons and ions have separated, creating a super-hot mix of charged particles. When charged particles move, they naturally create magnetic fields, which in turn have an additional effect on how the particles move. The plasma in the sun sets up a complicated system of cause and effect in which plasma...

Read More........→February 15, 2016

Superluminous Supernova 20 Times Brighter Than 100 Billion Stars Wows Astronomers

Records are made to be broken, as the expression goes, but rarely are records left so thoroughly in the dust. Stunned astronomers have witnessed a cosmic explosion about 200 times more powerful than a typical supernova--events which already rank amongst the mightiest outbursts in the universe--and more than twice as luminous as the previous record-holding supernova. At its peak intensity, the explosion--called ASASSN-15lh--shone with 570 billion times the brightness of the Sun. If that statistic does not impress, consider that this luminosity level is approximately 20 times the entire output of the 100 billion stars comprising our Milky Way galaxy. The record-breaking blast is thought to be an outstanding example of a "superluminous supernova," a recently discovered, supremely rare variety of explosion unleashed by certain stars when they die. Scientists are frankly at a loss, though, regarding what sorts of stars and stellar scenarios might be responsible for these extreme supernovae. These are pseudo-color images showing the host galaxy before the explosion of ASASSN-15lh taken by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) [Left], and the supernova by the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT) 1-meter telescope network [Right]. As described in a new study published today in Science, ASASSN-15lh Credit: The...

Read More........→January 15, 2016