Google and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have signed a three-year deal to use the tech giant’s artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance the agency’s environmental monitoring, weather forecasting and climate research, according to a joint announcement released Tuesday.
Hexavalent chromium is a carcinogen that was made famous by the 2000 film “Erin Brockovich,” which dramatized a case of industrial pollution that contaminated water supplies in California. A new study shows that Cr(VI) can slip into drinking water when commonly used chlorine disinfectants corrode cast iron water distribution pipes.
What if I purchase an early season ski pass– will it pay off with good snow this winter? Yoshimitsu Chikamoto, a climate scientist at Utah State University Utah had an idea to use climate modeling to help him decide.
Weather forecasting targets a short term, days to weeks, mostly based on atmospheric conditions. Forecasting climate patterns a year in advance is more complex, said Chikamoto.
“Weather forecasting needs the atmospheric model. In the climate model the atmospheric model is one component of the climate that also needs ocean and sea ice, and the land,” Chikamoto said.
There’s nothing quite like an infrastructure disaster to get the American public’s attention, whether it is the discovery of a drinking water system with dangerous levels of lead in Flint, Michigan, or a near-catastrophic dam failure in Oroville, California.
Twice a week, mathematics professor Andrea Bruder squats in the sewage tunnels below South Hall, a mostly freshman dorm at Colorado College. She wears head-to-toe protective gear and holds a plastic ladle in one hand and a to-go coffee cup in the other. Bruder hovers above an opening in a large metal pipe and patiently waits for a student to flush.
Conceptually it makes a lot of sense to farmers and oil producers alike: Use the latest filtration technology to turn one of Kern’s most troublesome waste streams — oilfield produced water — into a safe irrigation source.
For decades it’s been done on a relatively small scale near Bakersfield, and recent studies confirm it doesn’t threaten crop safety. So why aren’t more local oil producers giving farmers the briny water that comes up from the ground along with oil?
The first large-scale study of the risks that countries face from dependence on water, energy and land resources has found that globalisation may be decreasing, rather than increasing, the security of global supply chains.
With more than 4 million acres burned this year – shattering a state record – California’s wildfire season came with a wicked ferocity, along with the climate-induced crises of crippling heatwaves and forced power outages.
Radically transformed from its ancient origin as a vast tidal-influenced freshwater marsh, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem is in constant flux, influenced by factors within the estuary itself and the massive watersheds that drain though it into the Pacific Ocean. Lately, however, scientists say the rate of change has kicked into overdrive, fueled in part by climate change, and is limiting the ability of science and Delta water managers to keep up. The rapid pace of upheaval demands a new way of conducting science and managing water in the troubled estuary that is central to California’s water conveyance system.
California has an intricate and multifaceted system of water management. The state’s $1.1 billion water market allocates a concentrated supply to the areas that need it most. From farming to landscaping and personal consumption, there is a constant tension in the state’s supply and demand of this life-sustaining resource.
