GPS/GIS enabled tree census for Indian cities
Posted: March 31, 2009 Filed under: GIS, GPS, India, Urban Studies 3 Comments »Mumbai, India: Dr. Ramesh Madav, Chairman, Enbitech and CEO of Terracon Ecotech Pvt Ltd, successfully tested the Tree Census Methods, using GPS and GIS. The testing was done in presence of various technocrats, Municipal Corporation and Government representatives.Having completed Tree Census for Municipal Corporations of Thane, Nanded, Mira Bhayendar, Kalyan Dombivali, Navi Mumbai, Nashik and Greater Mumbai, Dr. Madav has become synonymous with Tree Census in India. Dr. Ramesh Madav, Founder and CEO of Terracon Ecotech Pvt. Ltd has been involved in various organisations and NGO’s for over two decades and has become an authority on Tree Census in India.The next Tree Census of the Thane Municipal Corporation, which is due soon, would be done using the GPS technology. Dr. Ramesh Madav, recently successfully tested the Digitisation of Tree census through the GPS and GIS.
Source : http://hamaraphotos.com
World’s 2nd Largest Solar Power Plant in Florida
Posted: March 30, 2009 Filed under: Alternative Energy, climate change, Earth Magnetism, Environment, pollution 4 Comments »
Solar power plant in Florida could serve 11,000 people.
Lauren Engineers & Constructors have signed a contract with Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) to develop the world’s second largest solar power plant in Indiantown, Florida. Using concentrated photovoltaic technology, the plant will be able to generate about 75MW of power, which could serve nearly 11,000 urban households.
Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center, as the project has been named, will be located on 500 acres of land adjacent to FPL’s Martin plant. The project will include about 200,000 parabolic mirrors and the total power produced for this new solar pant will be 155,000 MWh annually. FPL estimates that the plant will be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 2.75 million tons over the 30-year life of the project, which can be compared to taking 18,700 cars off the road each year.
The plant’s capacity to serve 11,000 urban homes with clean energy is commendable. However, with the cost of solar energy still above the $1 a watt benchmark, residents of Florida will definitely have to pay extra to go green.
firs published in Environment on Earth
BrahMos successfully tested in Pokhran
Posted: March 30, 2009 Filed under: Countries Leave a comment »
India successfully test fired its BrahMos cruise missile, jointly developed with Russia, in Pokhran, said a spokesman for BrahMos Aerospace Pvt. Ltd.
India’s army and navy plan to deploy the missile two years from now. The missile has a range of 290km and can be launched from submarines, ships, aircraft and land, according to the website of the New Delhi-based maker.
This was the second success for the missile, following a failure the first time the weapon was tested, Praveen Pathak, additional general manager at BrahMos Aerospace, said in a telephone interview.
Russian spaceship docks despite engine failure
Posted: March 29, 2009 Filed under: News, Solar System Leave a comment »The Soyuz TMA-14 spacecraft approaches the International Space Station for docking under the manual control of Commander Gennady Padalka after a sensor monitoring the engines apparently malfunctioned in this image from NASA TV March 28, 2009.
Astronauts on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft were forced to manually dock with the International Space Station (ISS) after an engine failure knocked out the automatic docking system.
The shuttle is carrying U.S. billionaire and Microsoft developer Charles Simonyi, who may become one of the last civilians to be taken to the ISS as the financial crisis hampers efforts to expand the space fleet, Vitaly Lopota, head of space corporation Energiya, told a briefing.
Concerns have been raised about the safety of the Soyuz TMA spacecrafts before because some of the most recent re-entries have not gone smoothly. There were so-called “ballistic” landings where the entry into the atmosphere was steeper than usual, exposing the crews to intense gravitational force.
CREDIT CRUNCH HITS OUTER SPACE
Hungarian-born Simonyi, 60, made his fortune developing software at Microsoft and has now made history as the first space tourist to make the journey twice.
But as Russia increases the size of the crews it sends to the ISS, there will be no more room for space tourists, even though they pay tens of millions of dollars for the privilege of joining a mission.
Russia has borne the brunt of sending crews and cargo to the multinational ISS since the U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry in 2003, killing its crew of seven.
Asia dims the lights for Earth Hour
Posted: March 28, 2009 Filed under: climate change, earth, Ecosystem Leave a comment »
A combination picture shows a view of the Hong Kong's financial district's (L-R) Bank of China Tower, Cheung Kong Centre, HSBC headquarters, Standard Chartered Bank and Legislative Council before (top) and during Earth Hour March 28, 2009.
Lights went out at Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge on Saturday for Earth Hour 2009, a global event in which landmarks and homes go dark for an hour to highlight the threat from climate change.In Asia, lights at landmarks in China, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines also dimmed as people celebrated with candle-lit picnics and concerts.”It’s been a great success. I wasn’t expecting so many people to come down and witness the blackout of the CBD,” Carine Seror, Singapore Earth Hour campaign manager for global environment group WWF, told Reuters.
Future Farmers Will Face Growing Climate change Dilemma
Posted: March 26, 2009 Filed under: climate change 2 Comments »
Farmers of the future will have to use cattle and sheep that belch less methane, crops that emit far less planet-warming nitrous oxide and become experts in reporting their greenhouse gas emissions to the government.Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases and globally that share will rise as demand for food from growing human populations also increases, scientist Richard John Eckard of the University of Melbourne said recently.But farmers are facing a near-impossible challenge: feeding the world while trying to trim emissions and adapt to greater extremes of droughts and floods because of global warming, he said.In coming years, farmers will have to monitor and report emissions as more nations move toward emissions trading.
Eckard said research into ways of trimming those emissions while maintaining production growth was not advanced enough.Australia, a major beef, dairy, wheat and wool producer, is aiming to launch the world’s most sweeping emissions trading scheme from mid-2010.Emissions from agriculture will be exempt until at least 2015 in part because technology to curb farm emissions is still in its infancy but also because adding costs to farmers is unpopular.But the government has said it is determined to tackle emissions from agriculture one way or another because they comprise 16 percent the nation’s total. In New Zealand, about half of national emissions come from agriculture.
CLEVER CATTLE, SMART CROPS
Methane, which is about 20 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, comes from the stomachs of ruminants, such as cattle and sheep. Nitrous oxide, about 310 times more powerful than CO2, comes from the soil in wheat, maize, rice and sugar cane crops.Eckard, who also works for the Victorian state government, said Australia had launched a national effort to find ways of tackling methane and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions.He leads a team that focuses mainly on intensive livestock systems and N2O emissions from wheat and grazing.He said steps under development in Australia included dietary supplements and vaccines that curb methane production in livestock, as well as improving the rate, source and timing of nitrogen fertilizer use.”We’ve evaluated oils and found out that for every one percent extra oil we put in the diet of a ruminant you get about a six percent reduction in methane,” he said, referring to cottonseed and canola oil.There was also a major project to breed a super variety of sheep and beef and dairy cattle that need less food to grow.Scientists are also developing crop varieties that need less water and nitrogen fertilizer, Eckard said.
Remote Sensing:Color & False Color Composites and Spectral Signatures
Posted: March 24, 2009 Filed under: Remote Sensing 101 1 Comment »
When a spectral band which contains reflectances in the wavelength interval between 0.7 – 1.1 µm is projected through a red filter, healthy, active vegetation will appear bright (light tones) in a black and white image or red in a false color image.
We can use color-filtered b & w pictures as transparencies projected through color filters and superposed (registered) to produce color composites. To do this, imagine this setup: Pick any scene containing many features and classes of differing colors. First, replace the prints with positive transparencies (tonally analogous to prints). Work with three b & w transparencies, each representing its spectral band. Shine white light through each one mounted in its own lamp projector (total of three) on to a screen. Project the blue band b & w transparency through a blue filter, the green through green, and the red through red. Blue features on the ground are clear areas in the blue spectral band. When the blue band transparency is projected through the blue filter, the blue features will be blue on an observing screen, likewise the green band projects green objects through its filter as green, and red as red. Co-register (line up) the three projections by superimposing several distinctive patterns that are common within the photographed scene. The result will be a simulated natural color image. with any red, green, and blue objects or classes showing in the projected image as these colors respectively. Other colors present are additive mixes of two or more primaries (e.g., yellow is a mix of red and green; orange is a mix of more red and some green; white is an equal mix of all three primaries, and black is simply the absence of any colored light of any wavelength). The colors that result from combinations of blue, green, and red (the primaries) are indicated in additive color diagram.
Spectral Signatures
For any given material, the amount of solar radiation that it reflects, absorbs, transmits, or emits varies with wavelength. When that amount (usually intensity, as a percent of maximum) coming from the material is plotted over a range of wavelengths, the connected points produce a curve called the material’s spectral signature (spectral response curve). Here is a general example of a reflectance plot for some (unspecified) vegetation type (bio-organic material), with the dominating factor influencing each interval of the curve so indicated:
This important property of matter makes it possible to identify different substances or classes and to separate them by their individual spectral signatures, as shown in the figure below. *
For example, at some wavelengths, sand reflects more energy than green vegetation but at other wavelengths it absorbs more (reflects less) than does the vegetation. In principle, we can recognize various kinds of surface materials and distinguish them from each other by these differences in reflectance. Of course, there must be some suitable method for measuring these differences as a function of wavelength and intensity (as a fraction [normally in percent] of the amount of irradiating radiation). Using reflectance differences, we may be able to distinguish the four common surface materials in the above signatures (GL = grasslands; PW = pinewoods; RS = red sand; SW = silty water) simply by plotting the reflectances of each material at two wavelengths, commonly a few tens (or more) of micrometers apart. Note the positions of points for each plot as a reflectance percentage for just two wavelengths:
In this instance, the points are sufficiently separated to confirm that just these two wavelengths (properly selected) permit notably different materials to be distinguished by their spectral properties. When we use more than two wavelengths, the plots in multi-dimensional space (3 can be visualized; more than 3 best handled mathematically) tend to show more separability among the materials. This improved distinction among materials due to extra wavelengths is the basis for multispectral remote sensing .
El Nino study challenges global warming intensity link
Posted: March 24, 2009 Filed under: opinions Leave a comment »UK team builds robot fish to detect pollution
Posted: March 21, 2009 Filed under: pollution 3 Comments »Robot fish developed by British scientists are to be released into the sea off north Spain to detect pollution.If next year’s trial of the first five robotic fish in the northern Spanish port of Gijon is successful, the team hopes they will be used in rivers, lakes and seas across the world.
The carp-shaped robots, costing 20,000 pounds ($29,000) apiece, mimic the movement of real fish and are equipped with chemical sensors to sniff out potentially hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or underwater pipelines.They will transmit the information back to shore using Wi-Fi technology.
Unlike earlier robotic fish, which needed remote controls, they will be able to navigate independently without any human interaction.Rory Doyle, senior research scientist at engineering company BMT Group, which developed the robot fish with researchers at Essex University, said there were good reasons for making a fish-shaped robot, rather than a conventional mini-submarine.”In using robotic fish we are building on a design created by hundreds of millions of years’ worth of evolution which is incredibly energy efficient,” he said.”This efficiency is something we need to ensure that our pollution detection sensors can navigate in the underwater environment for hours on end.”The robot fish will be 1.5 meters (nearly 5 feet) long — roughly the size of a seal.
U.S. Birds in Trouble
Posted: March 21, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 Comments »
Nearly one-third of all U.S. bird species are endangered, threatened or in significant decline, with birds in Hawaii facing a “borderline ecological disaster,” scientists reported recently.
The State of the Birds report, issued by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar along with conservation groups and university ornithologists, also noted some successes, including the recovery of the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon and other species after the banning of the chemical DDT.
The report, available online at www.stateofthebirds.org, presents data collected by government and academic scientists, as well as information contributed by amateur bird-watchers.
Wetland bird populations have soared since 1968, with an increase of up to 60 from levels 40 years ago. But birds in other habitats — forests, grasslands and arid areas — have declined as much as 40 percent.
HAWAIIAN BIRDS MOST VULNERABLE
It is in the perceived paradise of Hawaii that birds have declined the most, the report said.
“More bird species are vulnerable to extinction in Hawaii than anywhere else in the United States,” according to the report.
Before humans arrived in the Hawaiian islands, possibly as early as the year 300, there were 113 bird species that occurred nowhere else on Earth. Since humans arrived, 71 species have gone extinct and 31 more are listed as threatened or endangered.
The main culprits are new plant and animal species introduced into the Hawaiian ecosystem, said George Wallace of the American Bird Conservancy, who wrote the report’s section on Hawaii.
Overall, the United States is home to more than 800 species of birds; 67 of those are federally listed as endangered or threatened, with an additional 184 species causing concern because of they are narrowly distributed or have declining populations, the report said.
