“Each year, oil and fuel spills are caused by accidents involving tankers, barges, pipelines, trucks and storage facilities. When oil leaks into water, it spreads out rapidly forming a thin layer called a sheen. It can be harmful to birds, mammals, fish and plant life, and it can foul beaches and coastal areas. Search here to see some of the cases handled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Emergency Response Division, which provides technical and scientific help when oil spills into waterways.”
In one of the classic understatements of aviation history, Eric Moody turned on the flight intercom of his British Airways 747 and reported to his 248 passengers:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.
The date was 24 June 1982, and Moody’s 747 was south of Java, en route from Heathrow to Auckland, amidst an ash cloud from Mount Galunggung in Indonesia. At first it looked as if the only hope was to ditch the plane in the ocean. However, the crew was able to glide the plane (let’s all nod now to engineers who managed to create a jumbo jet that descends only one meter for every 15 flown without power) until successfully restarting three of the four engines, but the damage from the cloud made for a harrowing landing over the mountainous terrain around Jakarta. In 1989, another 747 temporarily lost use of all four engines due to a volcanic plume (from Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt).
Not surprisingly, since the British Airways incident, volcanic plumes—previously studied more closely for their climatic effects—have become a preoccupation of weather forecasters. The world meteorological and aviation communities have collaborated on the International Airways Volcano Watch, whose advisories Thursday led to the cancellation of flights across northern Europe due to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjalla volcano. It will be hard to overstate the consequence of this eruption for travelers around the world; it is already being compared to the no-fly days after 9/11.
The Science and Engineering Library hosts a number of databases that will give you access to the peer-reviewed literature dealing with the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate and weather.
I have a personal interest in geoengineering and I tend to read many publications that discuss these topics. Lat week Science had a short article about geoengineering that I found interesting:
. Eli Kintisch (26 February 2010). Science327 (5969), 1070-b. [DOI: 10.1126/science.327.5969.1070-b]
BOULDER—Painting the roofs of buildings white has the potential to significantly cool cities and mitigate some impacts of global warming, a new study indicates. The new NCAR-led research suggests there may be merit to an idea advanced by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu that white roofs can be an important tool to help society adjust to climate change.
Read the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) news release here. The full article published in Geophysical Research Letters can be read here.
Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences
The Street Level Forecast (SLF) is an interactive point forecast planning tool that brings customized forecasts to the user. SLF makes weather data accessible and user- friendly. Click on a specific location on an interactive map to receive personal forecasts such as wind and temperature that are provided on an easy-to-read graph.
The computer model that drives the SLF is run twice daily at a one kilometer resolution (a grid of points one kilometer apart across the region) and predicts conditions for the next 19 hours.
This SLF is an experimental prototype that Environment Canada will test during the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games period. This version will be live until March 31, 2010.
Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Library for Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of British Columbia
There are currently two very useful journal rankings SCImago and JCR. These rankings allow you to display amongst other things the h-index for a specific journal or a grouping of journals based on subject
“The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).” Scopus contains more than 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers as well as over 1000 open access journals. There are also over 500 conference proceedings in the database.
“Journal Citation Reports® is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 7,500 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 60 countries.”
JCR Science Edition contains data from over 5,900 journals in science and technology.
JCR Social Sciences Edition contains data from over 1,700 journals in the social sciences.
It is important to be aware of the size of the body of literature (the number of journals and conference proceedings) being indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Journals listed in JCR are indexed in the Web of Science The larger the database, the greater the possibility that articles will be discovered, read, and hopefully cited. This is especially important for open access journals, some of which have not yet been indexed in the Web of Science.
Eigenfactor ranking is based on Web of Science data.
Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Science and Engineering
NYT today has an article on an issue of great importance to all science disciplines – data management. The article – “A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing” overviews the new book published by Microsoft researchers – “The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery.”
This is a hot issue in science libraries too, as we are trying to understand how to deal with the vast amounts of digital data and whether libraries have a role to play to support, maintain and archive some of this data…