Glacier change in western North America: Influences on hydrology, geomorphic hazards and water quality. Moore, R.D.; Fleming, S.W.; Menounos, B.; Wheate, R.; Fountain, A.; Stahl, K.; Holm, K.; Jakob, M. Hydrological Processes Volume 23, issue 1, p 42-61, 2009.
The glaciers of western Canada and the conterminous United States have dominantly retreated since the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) in the nineteenth century, although average rates of retreat varied from strong in the first-half of the twentieth century, with glaciers stabilizing or even advancing until 1980, and then resuming consistent recession. This retreat has been accompanied by statistically detectable declines in late-summer streamflow from glacier-fed catchments over much of the study area, although there is some geographical variation: over recent decades, glaciers in northwest BC and southwest Yukon have lost mass dominantly by thinning with relatively low rates of terminal retreat, and glacier-fed streams in that region have experienced increasing flows. In many valleys, glacier retreat has produced geomorphic hazards, including outburst floods from moraine-dammed lakes, mass failures from oversteepened valley walls and debris flows generated on moraines. In addition to these hydrologic and geomorphic changes, evidence is presented that glacier retreat will result in higher stream temperatures, possibly transient increases in suspended sediment fluxes and concentrations, and changes in water chemistry. With climate projected to continue warming over the twenty-first century, current trends in hydrology, geomorphology and water quality should continue, with a range of implications for water resources availability and management and hydroecology, particularly for cool and cold-water species such as salmonids.

Volume 23 Issue 1 of the the journal Hydrological Processes is a Special Issue looking at the Hydrologic Effects of a Shrinking Cryosphere.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences and Physical Geography.

Imagine no facebook, twitter, myspace, email, internet for a entire day?

Shutdown Day is a Global Internet Experiment whose purpose is to get people to think about how their lives have changed with the increasing use of the home computer, and whether or not any good things are being lost because of this.

The idea of Shutdown Day project is simple – just shutdown your computer for one whole day of the year and involve yourself in some other activities: outdoors, nature, sports, fun stuff with friends and family – whatever, just to remind yourself that there still exists a world outside your monitor screen.

For more information, go to Shutdown Day

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Science and Engineering Liaison Librarian

There are wide variety of CO2 calculators available on the web. Here’s a short list.

Government of Canada’s ecoACTION Tools and Calculators

EPA Climate Change – Greenhouse Gas Emissions Personal Emissions Calculator

My Carbon Footprint Carbon Calculator

Umweltbundesamt CO2 Rechner

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, and Geography.

A short article from the New Scientist discusses the Financial Times Energy Conference in London last week. It is a pretty interesting short read.

To see UBC researchers work in this area, you could go to Compendex database (a primary engineering database) – http://toby.library.ubc.ca/resources/infopage.cfm?id=715
and type “sustainable energy” as a topic search and UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA as “author affiliation”

** Photo by Lollie-Pop

The University of British Columbia Library and Springer are delighted to introduce a new Print on Demand feature linked to the Library’s eBook collection: MyCopy powered by SpringerLink.

As a current faculty member of the University of British Columbia, MyCopy allows you to order your own personal print copy of a Springer eBook included in the Library’s collection. The individual copy will be delivered as a printed soft cover version directly to your doorstep. Best of all, it will be available to all patrons for just $24.95 (USD plus GST & PST, including shipping and handling costs).

The University of British Columbia Library is one of the first libraries to introduce the MyCopy service that includes more than 11,000 eBooks out of a total of 30,000 eBooks available on SpringerLink. We invite you to take a look, browse this comprehensive eBook collection and take advantage of the MyCopy service.

If you find an eBook that you would like to use for a course, you can simply copy the URL in the address bar on SpringerLink and add this to your course syllabus. The students can then follow the URL and purchase the eBook directly on http://www.springerlink.com for home delivery.

Below are directions for ordering a MyCopy book for just $24.95 (USD plus GST & PST, including shipping and handling costs)
1. Go to SpringerLink: http://www.springerlink.com
2. Search or browse eBooks in your research area (Available titles will have an orange MyCopy label associated with it.)
3. Click on the eBook or eBook chapter of your interest
4. Click on the MyCopy Logo found underneath the eBook or eBook chapter information, or the “add to shopping cart now” link within the orange box on the right hand column to start the ordering process.

We trust you will find this feature a valuable addition to Springer’s eBook collection. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact UBC Librarians Joy Kirchner (joy.kirchner@ubc.ca) and Aleteia Greenwood (aleteia.greenwood@ubc.ca) or Springer at http://www.springerlink.com/feedback.

For a complete list of all Springer Ebooks including MyCopy titles go to the Springer eBooks by Subject Collection page and download the Excel spreadsheet for your discipline. Look for the column that contains the Springerlink openurl and paste this url into your browser.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for the Physical and Applied Sciences.

This is a quick post to remind you about various standards we have in the SciEng library:

* ASTM up to 2006
* CSA and ANSI standards up to 1995 (How to get those?)
* IEEE Standards: The IEEE Electronic Library provides access to over 1,000 current, revised and superceded standards in the field of electrical and computer engineering. You must be a UBC faculty, student or staff to access these resources. Print standards can be found in the UBC Library catalogue, though coverage varies.
* ISO: We own a number of ISO standards that are listed individually in our library catalogue, mostly from the early 1990s. Try typing ISO and standard? in catalogue search box.
* Open Access Standards (Free):
a.International Telecommunications Union (ITU-T)
b. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Standards. The Standards Council of Canada will grant a license for use of ISO and IEC international standards by recognized Canadian educational institutions in a credit course. Please contact us to learn more about this option.

Please do not hesitate to contact Kevin Lindstrom or Eugene Barsky if you require any additional info!

** Photo by Sifter

Professor David McClung from the Department of Geography has published more than forty articles dealing with slab avalanches, avalanche risk, and avalanche forecasting.

Dr. McClung’s most recent publications include

Expanding the snow-climate classification with avalanche-relevant information: initial description of avalanche winter regimes for southwestern Canada. Haegeli, Pascal; McClung, David M. Journal of Glaciology, Volume 53, Number 181, March 2007, pp. 266-276.

Dry snow slab shear fracture speeds McClung, D.M. Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 34, 2007, L10502.

Snow Avalanches as a Non-critical, Punctuated Equilibrium System in Nonlinear Dynamics in Geosciences, Springer Verlag, 2007.

Thinking about heading into the back country? It might be useful to consult the Avalanche Handbook coauthored by David McClung and Peter Schaerer.

Other relevant avalanche websites include:

BC Provincial Emergency Program Avalanche Information
Canadian Avalanche Centre
Canadian Avalanche Foundation

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Earth and Ocean Sciences, Physical Geography

We would like to wish you happy holidays! We are looking forward to work with many of you next year!

Enjoy the snow 🙂

** Photo by velkr0

Environment Canada operates the National Climate Data and Information Archive. The Archive contains the official climate and weather observations for Canada.

Direct access to climate and weather values in the database is available at Climate Data Online. Use this area to find out what the weather was like on a particular day, for a month, or for a whole year.

The Canadian Climate Normals contain averages and extremes for nearly 1,500 locations across Canada. Use this area to find out about the conditions usually found at a location at different times of the year.

Canadian Daily Climate Data (CDCD). The 2006/7 CDCD containing daily temperature, precipitation and snow-on-the-ground data is available for download.

Data files can be download in CSV or XML format for further analysis.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom, Liaison Library for Earth and Ocean Sciences

Interested in what’s going on at Google? There are a number of ways of doing this. Going to Google Labs will show you some of their cool new technologies.

What else is going on at Google? Searching the ACM Digital Library for Google in the Affiliations field retrieves 359 papers. The most recent being Programming the Intel 80-core network-on-a-chip terascale processor. A paper presented at the of the 2008 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing held in Austin, Texas.

Another good database to look at is Compendex. Repeating the same affiliation search in Compendex retrieves 278 papers. The most recent article in Compendex is A New Baseline for Image Annotation published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 5304, pages 316-329, 2008.

Okay. Let’s look at how Google protects its intellectual property. A search of the Google Patents database for Google in the assignee name field retrieves 100 patents/patent applications with the most recent US patent 7,352,833 Method and System for Temporal Autocorrelation Filtering being published on May 8, 2008.

Repeating the same search in Espacenet retrieves over 1675 patents/patent applications with most recent patent/patent application US 20080301093 A1 Determining Search Query Statistical Data for an Advertising Campaign Based on User-Selected Criteria published on December 4, 2008.

Okay, here’s the challenge. Use Google Scholar find the most up-to-date recent articles, patents/patent applications written by researchers at Google. Let me know what you find and how easy it was.

Moral of the story. There is something to be said for databases such as Compendex, Web of Science and Scifinder Scholar that index thousands of journals and conference proceedings and have sophisticated search interfaces that allow you – the end user to find exactly what you are looking for.

Submitted by Kevin Lindstrom Kevin Lindstrom Liaison Librarian for Electrical and Computer Engineering, Earth and Ocean Sciences, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Materials Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, and Physical Geography.