August 10

The Hare and the Tortoise: The Real Lesson
By Dennis Bauer www.dennisbauer.com

You can see the crowd, stirring up dust at the starting line. Bets are being taken, all in favor of the confident and speedy hare. A pair of tortoise toes take the white-chalked line, followed by the revved-up hare. At one side, the official raises his hand high in the air as the starting gun signals the start of the race.

The hare, bolting from the line is out of sight over the first hill. At the same time, you see the back feet of the tortoise shuffle across the starting line.

Eventually, news reports flash to the crowd that the hare, so far ahead of his competition, has taken a detour to granny hare’s house for some cookies and tea. Having eaten, drunk and relaxed, the hare decides he has plenty of time to catch a quick snooze in granny hare’s hammock.

The day wears on. You check your watch. The hare should have crossed the distant finish line hours ago, but there are no reports …until suddenly the news desk jolts the crowd with the astonishing news that the tortoise is in sight and, in fact, only minutes from crossing the finish line.

Miles back, the hare awakens, groggy from a long afternoon nap, taking a few moments to remember where he is. Then with a start he remembers the race, shakes off the stiffness and resumes the contest. But as he races around the last turn, the tortoise’s nose crosses the finish line and the competition is over. The trophy still sits on tortoise’s mantle.

You have heard the moral: The race is not to the swift, but to the slow and steady.

But that is not the real lesson of the fable! Think about it. The only reason the tortoise won was because the hare took a nap. The tortoise did not win because he was slow and steady. He won because the hare slept during the contest.

The REAL lesson of the fable is this: In competition, you cannot sleep …your competitor isn’t!

What competition are you in? Are you in business? Do not take it lightly …your competitors aren’t. Are you a student? In a world where there are more applicants than jobs, you must work hard …don’t slow down …your competitors aren’t. Are you a teacher? Your competition is everything that takes a student’s attention from your lessons, and that competition is amazingly diverse and powerful. Give it your all …your competition certainly is!

Keep running! In a competitive world, you cannot afford to sleep while the contest is on. That would be a hare-brained idea!

See you in a couple of weeks!

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Really high school project takes pictures from space
Andrew Doughman
Seattle Times

Even the brightest high-school student might have a hard time with this one: How do you capture photographs of the atmosphere from 20 miles above Earth?

Two seniors from Aviation High School in Des Moines, Taylor Barrett and Alex Simkus, had a $350 answer. They hoisted a cheap camera into the atmosphere using a helium-filled balloon — the balloon and the helium were the bulk of the cost — and tracked it with a GPS so they could recover the digital photos wherever it landed.

The 1,418 photographs they retrieved show the ascent and descent of the balloon: brown and yellow Eastern Washington landscapes, the troughs and ridges of the day's cloud cover, the blue curve of the Earth from an estimated 100,000 feet, the spinning free-fall after the balloon burst and, finally, a field of dry grass near Highway 2.

Barrett and Simkus, both 18, did it all with everyday technology.

They shopped on eBay for a used Boost Mobile Motorola i290 phone — that became their GPS — and for a used Canon Powershot A470, their camera, which they modified to take a photograph every 10 seconds. They bought an 800-gram, latex meteorological balloon and canisters of helium to fill it. Everything else — the Styrofoam container, the hand warmers to keep the electronics functioning at low temperatures, batteries for the phone and camera — they had around the house.

Each year, seniors at Aviation High are required to undertake an open-ended "senior project." Planning begins in September in consultation with a faculty adviser, who gives the final go-ahead.

Taking photographs from near-space combined Simkus' interests in engineering and problem-solving with Barrett's interests in photography. The two were inspired by a similar experiment conducted by three MIT students last September.

Simkus and Barrett's results were due May 21, a Friday. The Monday before, the seniors still had nothing. A launch on May 11 had failed when strong winds blew their apparatus parallel to the ground.

"Basically, to graduate high school we had to pass this," Barrett said. "We had to make it work."

So on May 19, the two seniors cut school for their project. They had to, Barrett said, because the winds were right for the launch.

That Wednesday morning, Barrett left home in Burien in his Jeep at 2 a.m., swung by Normandy Park to pick up Simkus, drove four hours to a field just east of Ellensburg and began to prepare.

At about 6 a.m., all was ready. Simkus held on to the spherical balloon — roughly his height. All that prevented it from shooting into the sky was his firm grip.

"I didn't want to let go," he said.

He did let go, but his hands shook even after the balloon had disappeared.

"The entire time, we were pretty nervous," Simkus said. "A lot of stuff had to go right."

They tracked the balloon live via the Internet until it landed at 10 a.m. near Jameson Lake in Douglas County — 61 miles northwest of their launch site.

Using a GPS tracker borrowed from a schoolmate, Barrett drove the Jeep toward the landing site. They exited Highway 2 onto a dirt road, continued off-road for about a mile and finally walked through a field to the balloon.

When they arrived, they found the camera with its photos from near-space.

"It was a climax of a ton of different moments," Barrett said. "We were like 4-year-olds."

They brought their results back on time, and their teachers approved; Simkus and Barrett will graduate next Thursday.

What's next?

Simkus has a scholarship to attend the Webb Institute, a marine-engineering college in New York; and Barrett will be a freshman at Washington State University.

Click here to see the balloon's flight path.

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NPR Mourns Global Cooler-Turned-Global Warmer Scientist
By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute

Few seem to remember now, but throughout the 1970s, the advertised threat to society from global cooling was as prevalent as the current global warming alarmism. Publications including The New York Times, Time and Newsweek – the same ones hyping the dangers of a warming planet in 2010 – were warning about global cooling then.

A prominent global cooler from that era has recently passed away. Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University climatologist and United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change member died in London on July 19, as noticed on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

In an interview with NPR’s Michele Norris, White House Science Adviser John Holdren remembered Schneider, not for getting the science wrong at first but for inventing this field of science, with its acknowledgement that mankind could change the climate.

“Steve would come up with crucial insights that really opened up whole new dimensions of research in climate science,” Holdren said on the July 19 broadcast. “One of his big contributions was that the influences that humans were having on climate was not just the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane and others, but our influence also included the effects of particles. And he was sometimes criticized for being too extreme. But, in fact, he was very middle of the road. Steve was as fierce in his criticism of people who he thought were overstating what we know about climate as he was in his criticisms of those he thought were understating.”

Holdren is a curious but perhaps appropriate individual for NPR to turn to in remembering the work on Schneider and his theory of human’s impacting nature extensively. In the 1970s, Holdren made his own controversial statements. In a 1973 book he co-authored with Paul R. Ehrlch and Anne H. Ehrlich, Holdren called for a “massive” campaign to “de-develop” the United States.

However, according to Holdren, Schneider saw the light and got on the global warming bandwagon – not because the theory of global cooling was proven false, but just because the theories were competing and global warming seemed to have won out.

“In the early 1970s, everybody was in doubt as to the outcome of the competition between the cooling effects of particles and, on the other hand, the warming effect of greenhouse gases,” Holdren said. “And it was only with the emergence of additional data and additional analyses that it became clear that the greenhouse gases were going to win this competition. And at that point, he was one of the first to point out that, in fact, overall, we were heading for a much hotter world.”

In 2007, the Business & Media Institute looked at news media coverage of climate change and found alarmism stretching back 100 years. BMI’s Special Report: Fire & Ice exposed the media’s warnings about impending climate doom during four different times in the last century switching from worries over global cooling to warming to cooling to warming again.

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The Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force

Obama Administration officials released the Final Recommendations of the Ocean Policy Task Force on July 19, 2010, which would establish a National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Coasts, and Great Lakes (National Policy) and create a National Ocean Council (NOC) to strengthen ocean governance and coordination. The Final Recommendations prioritize actions for the NOC to pursue, and call for a flexible framework for coastal and marine spatial planning to address conservation, economic activity, user conflict, and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts and the Great Lakes.

The NOC would coordinate across the Federal Government to implement the National Policy. The Final Recommendations also call for the establishment of a Governance Coordinating Committee to formally engage with state, tribal, and local authorities. The Final Recommendations are expected to be adopted into an Executive Order by President Obama.

“President Obama recognized that our uses of the ocean are expanding at a rate that challenges our ability to manage significant and often competing demands,” said Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “With a growing number of recreational, scientific, energy, and security activities, we need a national policy that sets the United States on a new path for the conservation and sustainable use of these critical natural resources.”

On June 12, 2009, President Obama sent a memorandum to the heads of executive departments and Federal agencies establishing an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, led by the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The Task Force is charged with developing a recommendation for a national policy that ensures protection, maintenance, and restoration of oceans, our coasts and the Great Lakes. It will also recommend a framework for improved stewardship, and effective coastal and marine spatial planning.

In June 2009, President Obama created the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force and charged it with developing recommendations to enhance national stewardship of the ocean, coasts, and Great Lakes and promote the long term conservation and use of these resources. The Task Force was led by CEQ and included 24 senior-level policy officials from across the Federal Government.

At the President’s direction, the Task Force released an Interim Report in September 2009 and an Interim Framework for Effective Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning in December 2009. Each of these reports was made available online for public comment. The Task Force received and reviewed close to 5,000 written comments from Congress, stakeholders, and the public before finalizing its recommendations. The Task Force’s Final Recommendations combine and update the proposals contained in the two earlier reports.

Read the Final Recommendations

Read the press release

You can read public comments on the Task Force here.

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June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are Warmest on Record

Last month’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record and the warmest on record averaged for any April-June and January-June periods, according to NOAA. Worldwide average land surface temperature was the warmest on record for June and the April-June period, and the second warmest on record for the year-to-date (January-June) period, behind 2007.

The monthly analysis from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which is based on records going back to 1880, is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides government, business and community leaders so they can make informed decisions.

Global Temperature Highlights – June

	The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for June 2010 was the warmest on record at 61.1°F (16.2°C), which is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20th century average of 59.9°F (15.5°C).
	The global June land surface temperature was 1.93°F (1.07°C) above the 20th century average of 55.9 °F (13.3°C) — the warmest on record.

Warmer-than-average conditions dominated the globe, with the most prominent warmth in Peru, the central and eastern contiguous U.S., and eastern and western Asia. Cooler-than-average regions included Scandinavia, southern China and the northwestern contiguous United States.

According to Beijing Climate Center, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Jilin had their warmest June since national records began in 1951. Meanwhile, Guizhou experienced its coolest June on record.

According to Spain’s meteorological office, the nationwide average temperature was 0.7°F (0.4°C) above normal, Spain's coolest June since 1997

	The worldwide ocean surface temperature was 0.97°F (0.54°C) above the 20th century average of 61.5°F (16.4°C), which was the fourth warmest June on record. The warmth was most pronounced in the Atlantic Ocean.
	Sea surface temperature continued to decrease across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during June 2010, consistent with the end of El Niño. According to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, La Niña conditions are likely to develop during the northern hemisphere summer 2010.

April – June 2010 and Year-to-Date

	The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for April-June 2010 was 1.26°F (0.70°C) above the 20th century average—the warmest April-June period on record.
	For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 57.5°F (14.2°C) was the warmest January-June period. This value is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20th century average.

Polar Sea Ice and Precipitation Highlights

	Arctic sea ice covered an average of 4.2 million square miles (10.9 million square kilometers) during June. This is 10.6 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the lowest June extent since records began in 1979. This was also the 19th consecutive June with below-average Arctic sea ice extent.
	Antarctic sea ice extent in June was above average, 8.3 percent above the 1979-2000 average—resulting in the largest June extent on record.
	China had near-average precipitation. Regionally, Guizhou, Fujian and Qinghai had above-average precipitation during June 2010, resulting in the second wettest June since national records began in 1951—according to Beijing Climate Center. Meanwhile, the province of Jiangsu had its driest June on record, while Shanxi had its second driest on record.
	According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, the continent had its fourth-driest June on record.
	The first six months of 2010 were the driest since 1929 for the United Kingdom, according to the UK Met Office. The average rainfall during January-June 2010 was 14.3 inches (362.5 mm), just 3.4 inches (86.8 mm) above January-June 1929. The January-June long-term average is 20.1 inches (511.7 mm).

Scientists, researchers and leaders in government and industry use NOAA’s monthly reports to help track trends and other changes in the world's climate. This climate service has a wide range of practical uses, from helping farmers know what and when to plant, to guiding resource managers with critical decisions about water, energy and other vital assets.

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How to Study.com

“Managing Your Study Time” is an article available from How-To-Study.com that offers tips for students on honing their time-management skills. The article suggests that students stay organized by making calendars with increasing levels of specificity: a term calendar, a weekly calendar, and a daily organizer. How-To-Study.com offers other useful articles on studying, remembering, note taking, and test taking.

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No Surrender
By BJ Gallagher
From her book The Best Way Out is Always Through

For more about and from BJ Gallagher - click here

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First Map Of Global Forest Heights Created From NASA Data

Scientists have produced a first-of-its kind map of the height of the world's forests by combining data from three NASA satellites. The map will help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world's forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere.

Maps of local and regional forest canopy have been produced before, but the new map is the first that spans the entire globe using one uniform method. The map was based on data collected by NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites, along with the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat. Michael Lefsky, a remote-sensing specialist from Colorado State University in Ft. Collins, produced the final product. Lefsky describes his results in a journal paper to be published next month in Geophysical Research Letters.

The new map shows the world's tallest forests are clustered in North America's Pacific Northwest and portions of Southeast Asia. Shorter forests are found in broad swaths across northern Canada and Eurasia.

The primary data Lefsky used was from a laser technology called lidar on the ICESat. Lidar can capture vertical slices of forest canopy height by shooting pulses of light at the ground and observing how much longer it takes for light to bounce back from the surface than from the top of the forest canopy. Since lidar can penetrate the top layer of forest canopy, it provides a detailed snapshot of the vertical structure of a forest.

"Lidar is unparalleled for this type of measurement," Lefsky said. "It would have taken weeks or more to collect the same amount of data in the field by counting and measuring tree trunks that lidar can capture in seconds."

Lefsky based the map on data from more than 250 million laser pulses collected during a seven-year period. Because each pulse returns information about a tiny portion of the surface, lidar offered direct measurements of only 2.4 percent of the Earth's forested surfaces. To complete the map, Lefsky combined the lidar data with information from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), an instrument aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. MODIS observes a broad swath of Earth's surface, even though it does not supply the vertical profile.

The new results show that temperate conifer forests -- which are extremely moist and contain massive trees such as Douglas fir, western hemlock, redwoods, and sequoias -- have the tallest canopies, soaring above 131 feet. In contrast, boreal forests dominated by spruce, fir, pine, and larch had canopies typically less than 66 feet. Relatively undisturbed areas in tropical rain forests were about 82 feet tall, roughly the same height as the oak, beeches, and birches of temperate broadleaf forests common in Europe and much of the United States.

Measuring canopy height has implications for efforts to estimate the amount of carbon tied up in Earth's forests and for explaining what absorbs 2 billion tons of "missing" carbon each year. Humans release about 7 billion tons of carbon annually, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide. Of that, 3 billion tons end up in the atmosphere and 2 billion tons in the ocean. It's unclear where the remaining 2 billion tons of carbon go, although scientists suspect forests capture and store much of it as biomass through photosynthesis.

The new forest height map is a step toward a global map of all above-ground biomass. Sassan Saatchi, senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., already has started combining the height data with forest inventories to create biomass maps for tropical forests. Global biomass inventories will eventually be used to improve climate models and guide policymakers on carbon management strategies.

The next generation lidar measurements of forests and biomass, which will improve the detail of the map considerably, could come from a planned NASA satellite mission, called the Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice project. It is slated to launch no earlier than 2017.

For images and additional information about the map, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/forest-height-map.html

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NOAA Releases Data Report on Air Quality Measurements Near the Deepwater Horizon/BP Oil Spill Area

NOAA scientists today released a data report on air quality measurements taken in June in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill area. The report, available online, summarizes the levels of nearly 100 air pollutants measured with sophisticated air sampling instruments onboard a NOAA WP-3D research aircraft.

Scientists found common air pollutants, such as ozone, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide, in amounts typical of urban areas in U.S. cities. However, 15 to 70 kilometers downwind from the oil spill, concentrations of certain hydrocarbons were much higher than found in typical polluted air. Particulate matter downwind of the oil slick was comparable to concentrations in moderately polluted urban air, but the particles were almost entirely organic material, as opposed to those typically found in urban particulate matter. Scientists also measured large amounts of black carbon in smoke from a controlled burn of crude oil on the water.

“Data from the NOAA flights are providing an important detailed and independent set of air quality data to assess air quality risks of workers at sea and the public ashore,” said A. R. Ravishankara, director of the Chemical Sciences Division of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, who led the science team.

NOAA scientists measured the air pollutants in four areas, including in the immediate vicinity of the spill, downwind from the spill, and along the Mississippi, Alabama and Florida coastlines. They also measured “background” air in an area far from the spill to serve as a control sample. In analyzing the levels of the pollutants, scientists compared them to typical concentrations of a polluted U.S. urban area.

The near-shore measurements, 30 to 40 kilometers from shore, showed pollution concentrations generally lower than those typically found in urban areas. The background air was relatively free of pollution from the oil spill. A summary of the measurements is provided in Tables 1 and 2 of the report.

The air chemistry flights were conducted to support the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration to assess air quality for coastal residents and oil spill response workers.

“EPA has been monitoring air quality along the Gulf Coast since the start of this incident to ensure that residents have the best possible information on the air quality, and the data in this report are generally consistent with EPA’s findings,” said Gina McCarthy, EPA’s Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation. “EPA will continue to work with NOAA, other federal agencies and independent scientists to effectively monitor air quality and to provide residents living along the coast with the best possible information about the air they are breathing.”

“In order to evaluate worker exposure, OSHA has been conducting its own air monitoring in the Gulf, as well as reviewing all additional available data. Our findings are consistent with NOAA’s data,” says Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health. “We will continue to work closely with all other Federal Agencies to monitor the health and safety hazards facing workers involved in the oil spill response.”

The report offers a highly detailed snapshot of the concentrations of hydrocarbons and other organic chemicals, particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, peroxyacetyl nitrate and a host of other air pollutants in the Gulf in early June. Measurements were taken from as low as 60 meters above sea level and up to 1,000 meters above sea level, with most flight tracks being about 150 meters above the Gulf.

In order to conduct the air sampling, NOAA temporarily diverted the WP-3D plane from its planned participation in the CalNex research mission, a multi-agency field study on California climate change and air quality issues. NOAA scientists recognized that the well-instrumented plane could help in meeting the need to understand how the oil spill was affecting air quality.

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See What's Brewing in 'Hurricane Alleys' Live Online, on iPad and iPhone via GOES Satellite

Scientists working for NASA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. have developed continually updating "movies" of satellite imagery that allows on-line, iPhone and iPad viewing of any cyclone's movement in the Hurricane Alleys of the Atlantic Ocean or Eastern Pacific Ocean.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) GOES-13 satellite captures visible and infrared images of the weather over the U.S. East coast. These images are overlaid on a true-color background map, and fed into small and medium-sized videos of the Gulf of Mexico and the nearby Atlantic Ocean for the last 3 days. The GOES-11 satellite provides similar coverage of the U.S. west coast and Eastern Pacific.

The GOES satellites scan further into the oceans twice per hour, offering the opportunity to watch storm development in the swath called "Hurricane Alley," from Atlantic to Pacific. The bigger scans are used to make large-scale Hurricane Alley movies for the last three to five days, illustrating the life-cycle of subtropical storms, as some of them spin up to become hurricanes.

The GOES satellites also scan the entire disk of the Earth every three hours. These are used to produce "full disk movies" from the last five days of satellite imagery data from GOES-13 in the Atlantic and GOES-11 in the eastern Pacific. With just eight frames per day, time flies by quickly as weather circulates across the Western Hemisphere.

"We have recently changed the code for the up-to-date GOES movies, including the "Hurricane Alley" movies, that have links on the page goes.gsfc.nasa.gov," said Dr. Dennis Chesters of the NASA GOES Project at Goddard. "They are now all encoded with H264, the digital compression standard used by the cable TV industry."

Because of the modern video standard, these play on all personal computers (Windows and Macs) that are up-to-date.

Dr. Chesters said that the NASA GOES Project also slightly resized the GOES movies, so that all of the movies have at least one dimension that is a sub-multiple of a standard HDTV dimension (720/1080). "This makes it easy for software that automatically fits movies to a screen to resize them without complicated interpolation," Dennis said. "So, the movies appear sharp and have snappy playback on small-screen devices. For instance, they work nicely on the popular iPads."

As a hidden bonus, each of the four frames at the top of the page (WEST+EAST for USA+GLOBE) is linked to a "reference movie" that downloads a movie that is the right size for your device. This is a Quicktime-only feature that will work on all Apple computers and Windows PCs that have Quicktime installed. The "reference movie" will accommodate iPhones and iPads as well as Macs and PCs. It sends a highly compressed version if the device is using a slow G3 phone link, but sends a larger, less compressed version to bigger screens with faster connections.

To watch the animated progression of hurricane Alex, click here.

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M.Y. S.P.A.C.E. Photos from the conference posted.
Click Here

Be a M.Y. S.P.A.C.E. Teacher
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to find out how

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GIS for Beginners on a Budget – 2010 Edition
Presenter: Pete Arvedson

This is a hands-on workshop for the novice learning basics of geographic information system software and how to use GIS with satellite imagery. Includes how-to resources, sample lesson exploring effects of the gulf oil spill on gulf coast fisheries, and free access to ESRI’s ArcGIS Explorer software and associated lesson files for use with your students or at home.

A geographic information system (GIS) integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information.

GIS allows us to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts.

A GIS helps you answer questions and solve problems by looking at your data in a way that is quickly understood and easily shared.

This will be a 2 1/2 hour session on Thursday 8/12, 12:30 - 3pm. If you haven't yet registered for the conference click here to register and add the GIS session to your registration. If you've already registered you can add GIS registration by clicking here. There is a $90 fee.

Volunteers, Presenters and Exhibitors wishing to attend should contact Dr. Arvedson, parveds@calstatela.edu.

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Tracking the Gulf Oil Spill – a GIS Lesson
Presenter: Pete Arvedson

Explore questions about the oil spill and its effects on gulf fisheries. Design lessons for your students using interactive geographic information system (GIS) maps of the gulf oil spill based on NOAA satellite imagery analysis and National Marine Fisheries Service data. Session materials are easily adaptable to your own investigations in Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry and Physics classes. Includes how-to resources, lesson materials based on GIS and NOAA satellite imagery, free access to ESRI’s Arc GIS Explorer software for use with your students or at home, and GIS lesson files usable with ArcGIS Explorer and ArcGIS Desktop 9x.

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Deepwater Horizon/BP Oil Spill: 100 Days — A Snapshot of NOAA's Response

As the nation’s experts on oceanic and atmospheric science, the lead science agency for oil spills — and the nation's steward for our oceans, coasts and Great Lakes — NOAA has been on the scene from day one, providing coordinated scientific, weather and biological information and products when and where they are needed most.

We have mobilized personnel from across the agency to contain and predict the spreading oil, ensure human health and safety, including the safety of seafood, and protect the Gulf of Mexico’s many marine mammals, sea turtles, fish, and other imperiled sea creatures. Here's a brief snapshot of some of NOAA's efforts and achievements in the first hours — and the first 100 days — of this aggressive and sustained federal response.

NOAA Science Informs
From the very beginning, NOAA has provided extensive scientific expertise and monitoring capabilities to inform daily response operations and to help quantify and better understand the impacts of the spill on the Gulf ecosystems — including its effects on the undersea world. NOAA’s information enables responders to anticipate where the oil is going and predict what areas could be impacted.

Assessing Ecosystem Damage
NOAA is the lead agency for the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process helping identify and quantify short- and long-term impacts to the Gulf of Mexico’s thriving ecosystems. NOAA continues to collaborate with various federal and state agencies, industry, and citizens to collect data in the Gulf of Mexico and across the affected states to determine which natural resources have been harmed, which remain in jeopardy and which human uses have been lost.

Protecting Wildlife and Habitats
From microscopic organisms to sperm whales to marshes to the deep ocean, Gulf Coast wildlife and habitats are better protected from the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon/BP disaster because of our efforts. As stewards of our nation’s coasts, oceans and marine wildlife, NOAA is vitally concerned about the short-term and long-term impacts of the oil spill on the ecological health of the Gulf of Mexico and the marine life it supports.

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Making Mousse (an oil spill lesson)
From NOAA

1. First, get a glass (mason) jar. Fill it half full of water, and then add half a cup of vegetable oil. Screw the lid on (tight!). Pass the jar around.

Note that no matter how you handle the jar, up or down, the oil always floats on top of the water (we say that the oil is less DENSE than the water).

2. Next, start shaking the jar (be careful not to drop it).

The oil and the water appear to be mixing together. This is what happens in the ocean when the oil and the water get mixed up by the waves during strong wave action or during a storm.
As you shake the jar, if you watch carefully, you'll see that the oil blobs get smaller and smaller (just as they would on the ocean during a storm that lasted for a long time). At the same time, tiny amounts of water fill up the spaces between the oil blobs. This mixture of oil and water is called emulsified oil or MOUSSE. There is an animal called a moose. There is mousse you put in your hair to style it a certain way. But this MOUSSE is emulsified oil. It is just oil mixed vigorously with water.

3. Set the jar aside and then wait a few minutes. Then take another look at the jar.

As soon as you stop shaking the jar, the oil that was all mixed up with the water will begin to separate out. The oil will once again float up to the top, and the more dense water will stay at the bottom. Oil floats!
The mousse that you make by shaking oil in a jar doesn't last very long. In just several minutes, you'll see that the oil and water unmix back into separate layers. Usually, once oil that has spilled on the ocean has formed a mousse, it also eventually unmixes from the water in this way (though it usually takes longer). But sometimes, it stays a mousse. We aren't quite sure why mousse sometimes lasts for a long time and sometimes doesn't. Maybe someday you'll be the one to research this mystery and find the answer!

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Graphing Changes in Marine Life Abundance
From NOAA

Want to try your hand at some marine biology? Then grab your raingear and follow the steps below to make a study of the marine life occupying a section, or quadrat, of Mearns Rock (a boulder in Prince William Sound, Alaska, that was oiled in 1989 by the Exxon Valdez oil spill). For your study, you'll use a series of zoomed-in photos of that quadrat. Each shows a different year from 1990 to 2009. Your goal will be to see how the percent cover of mussels, barnacles, and Fucus gardneri (a kind of seaweed, also called rockweed) in this study area has changed during those 19 years.

As you complete this project, you'll be using the same method used by real marine biologists. To study how marine life abundance changes from one year to the next, marine biologists sometimes section off a small plot of land that's representative of the particular habitat they're studying (for example, a rocky shoreline or a bog). They use a frame (generally a 0.25 or 0.5 square meter of rebar or PVC pipe), known as a quadrat (or "quad" for short), which they place on the ground to mark an area to study in depth. Each year, the biologists return to count the organisms or plants that occupy the area inside the quad. In the photo above, one of OR&R's marine biologists is using a quad in his studies of the Mearns Rock site. He's trying to find out how the abundance of Fucus, barnacles, mussels, and other organisms changed over the years following the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

1. Before You Begin

Collect the resources you'll need:

	Open our mini field guide (Document format: PDF, size: 154.9 K). You'll use it to recognize the species in your quad, estimate their percent cover, and establish the criteria you'll use to make your observations.
	Open and print out our data table (Document format: PDF, size: 17.6 K). You'll use it to record your estimates of percent cover of species in the quad.

2. Observe and Record

Now, open the series of high-resolution photos of the same quadrat of Mearns Rock, taken each year from 1990 to 2008. As you examine each photo in the series, try to estimate how much of the quadrat that Fucus occupies (as a percent of the total area), how much of the quadrat mussels occupy, and how much of it barnacles occupy. We've prepared some viewing tips to help you observe the marine species. Record your estimates in the data table you printed out.

Open the photo series of the Mearns Rock quadrat.

3. Plot Your Data

Your final step will be to graph your data, so that you can see trends over time in the relative abundance of the three species in the quadrat. Your graphs will look similar to those that marine ecologists make after actually measuring the amount of cover!

Open and print timeline graphs (Document format: PDF, size: 61.1 K). You'll plot your data on these graphs.

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	CONGRATULATIONS to Richard Shope and Dean Davis for being UNANIMOUSLY elected as President and Vice President of the Satellite Educators Association. We had one of the highest returns on votes that we have ever had and often with enthusiastic support for the nominees. We welcome them and are excited about the future of SEA under their leadership! Dean Davis was just awarded the 2010 National Coalition for Aviation and Space Education (NCASE) Crown Circle Award at the Experimental Airplane Association (EAA) AirVenture Air Show. We celebrate his being honored
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August 2010	Share on Facebook Share