One of the many effects of global warming is sea-level rise due to the melting and retreat of the Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers as well as other sources. As the sea level rises, large areas of densely populated coastal land could ultimately become uninhabitable without extensive coastal modification. It is therefore vital to understand the impact of different pathways of future climate change on changes in sea level caused by ice sheets and glaciers.

A team of researchers from Hokkaido University, The University of Tokyo and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) explored the long-term perspective for the Antarctic ice sheet beyond the 21st century under global-warming conditions, assuming late 21st-century climatic conditions remain constant. Their models and conclusions were published in the Journal of Glaciology.

The Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (ISMIP6) was a major international effort that used the latest generation of models to estimate the impact of global warming on the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. The objective was to provide input for the recently published Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The contribution of the Antarctic ice sheet to sea-level rise by 2100 was assessed to be in the range between ?7.8 and 30.0 centimetres under unabated warming and between 0 and 3 centimetres under reduced emissions of greenhouse gases.

The team used the ice-sheet model SICOPOLIS (SImulation COde for POLythermal Ice Sheets) to extend the whole ISMIP6 ensemble of fourteen experiments for the unabated warming pathway and three for the reduced emissions pathway. Until the year 2100, the set-up was the same as in the original ISMIP6 experiments. For the time beyond 2100, it was assumed that the late 21st-century climatic conditions remain constant — no further climate trend was applied. The team analysed the results of the simulations with respect to the total mass change of the ice sheet, regional changes in West Antarctica, East Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, and also the different contributors to mass change.

The simulations of mass loss of the Antarctic ice sheet show that, by the year 3000, the unabated warming pathway produces a sea-level equivalent (SLE) of as much as 1.5 to 5.4 metres, while for the reduced emissions pathway the SLE would be only 0.13 to 0.32 metres. The main reason for the decay under the unabated warming pathway is the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, made possible by the fact that the West Antarctic ice sheet is grounded on a bed that is mostly well below sea level.

“This study demonstrates clearly that the impact of 21st-century climate change on the Antarctic ice sheet extends well beyond the 21st century itself, and the most severe consequences — multi-meter contribution to sea-level rise — will likely only be seen later,” says Dr. Christopher Chambers of Hokkaido University’s Institute of Low Temperature Science and lead author of the paper. “Future work will include basing simulations on more realistic future climate scenarios, as well as using other ice-sheet models to model the outcomes.”

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The new research on these unique soils, being presented on Wednesday, 15 December at AGU Fall Meeting 2021, marks the first attempt to quantify carbon capture by canopy soils. The work highlights another way old-growth forests are rich, complex ecosystems that cannot be quickly replaced by replanting forests.

Tree branches collect fallen tree leaves and other organic material over hundreds of years, like the ground does. On top of the branches, the plant litter decomposes as it accumulates, forming a carbon-rich layer that can be several inches thick. The researchers climbed up into the rainforest canopy in Costa Rica, instruments in hand, to find out just how much carbon canopy soils can contain.

Active carbon, a short-term storage pool of organic carbon, was three times higher in canopy soil compared to soils underfoot, the researchers found.

“We knew these would be really organic-rich soils, but we didn’t expect the extremely large amount of carbon compared to mineral soils,” said Hannah Connuck, an undergraduate researcher at Franklin and Marshall College who will be presenting the study results.

The researchers are still calculating the total concentration of organic carbon at their research site, but other research has found canopy soils to have up to 10 times higher concentrations of organic carbon, according to soil scientist Peyton Smith, a study co-author and Connuck’s soil science mentor at Texas A&M University.

Connuck and Smith also measured how much carbon dioxide was being released by microbial organisms living in the canopy soils, which is critical for knowing whether soils are storing or releasing carbon overall. They found that even though the microbes were releasing higher volumes of carbon dioxide than ground soils, their rate of carbon storage was rapid enough to compensate, likely making canopy soils a net carbon sink that has not been considered in carbon models yet.

“It could be a substantial carbon sink, and we need to account for it,” Smith said.

Like other soils, canopy soils take a long time to form, and therefore take a long time for a forest to recover if an area of old growth is cut down. The soils also host unique microbiomes, including highly diverse microbial organisms and canopy-specific plants like epiphytic orchids.

“It’s a good argument for keeping primary and other old-growth forests around, rather than harvesting and replanting with secondary growth forests,” Connuck said.

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Observations from research aircraft show that the Southern Ocean absorbs much more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases, confirming it is a very strong carbon sink and an important buffer for some of the effects of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new NASA-supported study.

Recent research had raised uncertainty about just how much atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) these icy waters absorb. Those studies relied on measurements of ocean acidity – which increases when ocean water absorbs CO₂ – taken by instruments that float in the ocean.

The new study, published in Science, used aircraft observations of CO₂ to show that the Southern Ocean is a stronger carbon sink than previously thought, playing a significant role in lessening some of the impacts of greenhouse gases. Aircraft observations were collected over nearly a decade from 2009 to 2018 during three field experiments, including from NASA’s Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) in 2016.

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“Airborne measurements show a drawdown of carbon dioxide in the lower atmosphere over the Southern Ocean surface in summer, indicating carbon uptake by the ocean,” explained Matthew Long, lead author and a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

They found that the Southern Ocean absorbs significantly more CO₂ in the Southern Hemisphere summer than it releases in the winter, making it a strong carbon sink. Data from the airborne campaigns also showed a larger amount of carbon absorbed by the Southern Ocean and smaller amount released than previous estimates using ocean acidity data. The findings highlight the importance of aircraft-based observations to understand carbon cycling.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA and NOAA.

The Ocean as a CO₂ Sponge

When human emissions of CO₂ enter the atmosphere, some of that gas is absorbed by the ocean. Cold water from the deep ocean rises to the surface through a process called upwelling. Once at the surface, that colder water absorbs CO₂ in the atmosphere – often with the help of photosynthesizing organisms called phytoplankton – before sinking again.

Measurements of CO₂ and other ocean properties suggest that 40% of the human-produced CO₂ in the ocean, worldwide, was originally absorbed from the atmosphere into the Southern Ocean, making it one of the most important carbon sinks on our planet. But measuring the flux, or exchange, of CO₂ where the air meets the sea has been challenging.

In this study, the team used airborne measurements from three field experiments: ATom, HIPPO and ORCAS. Collectively, these projects captured a critical piece of information: the vertical gradient of CO₂ in the atmosphere. For example, during the ORCAS campaign in early 2016, scientists saw a drop in CO₂ concentrations as the plane descended and high turbulence near the ocean surface, suggesting an exchange of gases like CO₂ between the air and ocean.

Taking measurements of CO₂ over the course of several field experiments flying above the Southern Ocean gave the scientists a series of snapshots of the vertical change in CO₂ (called profiles) over time and throughout the seasonal carbon cycle. These profiles, along with a suite of several atmospheric computer models, helped the team estimate the flux of how much CO₂ was being absorbed and released by the Southern Ocean throughout the year.

For more information about NASA’s Airborne Science programs, visit: https://airbornescience.nasa.gov/

“New home builders want to know how high they have to put their buildings to be safe for the future,” said Alfonso Mejia, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “They want to know how the flood zones are going to change in the future.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency issues flood maps for areas near rivers, but according to the researchers, FEMA does not update its maps frequently, nor does it project the future potential impact of climate change on how areas will flood. FEMA flood maps are based on historically observed flood records, not future possible events.

“FEMA does a good job in mapping flood hazards, but the part we are incorporating is the future climate so we can understand the impact of climate on flood hazards and exposure,” said Mejia.

The researchers, who published their results in the Journal of Hydrometeorology, considered a wide array of variables in their framework, including meteorological, hydraulic, hydrologic, topographic and others.

“The data and models required to project flood hazards and exposure come from diverse academic disciplines and they must be integrated and compatible,” said Sanjib Sharma, assistant research professor in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ Earth and Environmental Systems Institute.

Flood maps are usually drawn to show the 100-year flood inundation boundary, a flood that has a 1% chance of hitting an area in any given year. The researchers note that while they are producing 100-year maps, they also can produce 500-year maps. They also say that as time and climate change progress, the 100-year flood maps change as well. The map for 2050 is different from the map for 2100.

The researchers did a regional analysis to assess flood hazards and exposure across all the cities and boroughs in Pennsylvania.

“It’s a really complicated process and the geoscientists and engineers need to link with the policy and insurance people at all levels,” said Mejia.

The framework combines climate model outputs for a hydrologic model that creates streamflow projections. The streamflow projections are joined with a hydraulic model and a statistical model to map the uncertainty of flooding during extreme flooding events.

The researchers report that climate uncertainty dominates the overall uncertainty surrounding the flood inundation projection chain. The combined hydrologic and hydraulic uncertainties account for as much as 37% of the total uncertainty.

The study also found that in all of Pennsylvania, when accounting for changes that climate change will make, the areas that will be prone to flooding in the future are mostly the same areas that are prone to flooding now. Also, flooding peaks due to climate change will be worse for small basins.

The researchers also warn that “assuming a stationary climate can underestimate regional flood risk.”

“We know what the problem is, and where, but it is the severity of the problem that we don’t know,” said Sharma.

Also on the project from Penn State were Klaus Keller, professor of geosciences; Robert Nicholas, associate research professor of atmospheric sciences; and Michael Gomez, postdoctoral fellow in civil and environmental engineering.

This work was supported through the Penn State initiative for resilient communities by a strategic plan seed grant from the Penn State Office of the Provost, with co-support from the Center for Community Design, and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through the Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments program.

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The changing conditions also have cultural and economic implications for the people whose traditions and livelihoods are dependent on ocean resources, said James Watson, an assistant professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and the paper’s co-author.

“What we’re looking at here is the potential extinction of a whole environment,” said Watson, who specializes in marine social-ecological systems and understanding complex adaptive systems. “In some places, the environments we have today are not going to exist in the future. We won’t be able to go visit them or experience them. It is an environmental, cultural and economic loss we can’t replace.”

The researchers’ analysis of multiple climate scenarios showed:

• 60% to 87% of the ocean is expected to experience multiple biological and chemical changes, such as increases in water temperature, higher levels of acidity and changes in oxygen levels, by the year 2060.
• The rate of change is expected to be even higher, 76% to 97%, in very large marine protected areas such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and the Galapagos Marine Reserve in Ecuador.
• Increases in pH, which measures ocean acidity, are expected as soon as 2030. Ocean acidification reduces the amount of carbonate in seawater, which is necessary for marine organisms, such as corals and mollusks like oysters, to develop their shells and skeletons.

The findings were published this week in the journal One Earth. The paper’s lead author is Steven Mana’oakamai Johnson, who conducted the research as part of his doctoral dissertation at Oregon State. Johnson, who earned his Ph.D. earlier this year, is now a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University.

The concept for the paper was borne from conversations between Johnson, a native of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific Ocean, and Watson, a native of England, about what is likely to be lost due to climate change. One thing is the disappearance of ocean conditions they each experienced as children.

“All of us have experiences we define as normal under a given set of environmental conditions,” said Johnson, who is has already witnessed climate change impacts such as a devastating coral bleaching event in Saipan.

“Properties such as temperature, acidity and oxygen levels define what a given part of the ocean looks like. For both James and me, the ocean experience we grew up with and have memories of will likely not exist for our grandchildren.”

Using the last 50 years of ocean conditions as a measure of stability, the researchers used several climate models to see how six variables affecting ocean conditions might change as the planet warms. They used three warming scenarios with increasing degrees of severity.

“Our scenarios included likely, unlikely and highly unlikely degrees of warming, all of which are warmer today than they were 20 years ago,” Johnson said. “In all three scenarios, conditions in more than half of the ocean are going to be novel, meaning new and significantly different, than they have been in the last 50 years.”

Much of the change occurs in the ocean’s two extremes: the tropics and the Arctic. The warmest places are seeing warming conditions never seen before, and the coldest places, like the Arctic, are no longer as cold as they once were. The researchers also found that most of those changes will occur by 2060, though most of the change in pH, or acidity, levels is expected much sooner, by the end of the decade.

The change is more pronounced for the very large marine protected areas that are designed to preserve threatened species and rare habitats such as coral reefs around the world. As ocean conditions change, animals in those protected areas are likely to seek other locations that are more favorable for their survival.

“These marine protected areas are an important tool for achieving conservation goals and can take a lot of political and social will to establish and work as intended,” Johnson said. “In our analysis, 28 out of 29 of these areas will experience changes in conditions that could undermine conservation goals.”

The researchers’ findings present a picture of what the future might hold as the planet continues to warm, Johnson said. The research also offers important information to communities, policymakers and managers of protected habitats about how changing ocean conditions might impact them and how they might address those changes.

“For example, tuna thrive in certain ocean conditions. If the ocean gets too warm, the tuna may move to another area,” Johnson said. “If your country depends on tuna for food or livelihood, what impact will that have?

“Or if you’re a manager of a protected area, and you’re protecting a species that is no longer in the area, what do you do?”

This type of forecasting advances how climate change is quantified, Watson said. It also gives people an opportunity to come to terms with the trauma of what is being lost as well as begin to make plans for a future without those resources.

“This kind of work has been done before for changes on land due to climate change, but not for the ocean,” he said. “It’s important to acknowledge and accept what were are likely to lose, and that loss can also help motivate people to begin to adapt.”

Young people care deeply about the environment. You can see this even in young children. Ask a first grader to tell you about their favorite animals. They’ll undoubtedly tell you that those animals — whales, elephants, wolves, butterflies, turtles — are endangered because of human activity.

Caroline Hickman conducted a study of 10,000 young people (16- to 25-year-olds) across the globe to gauge how they felt about climate change. In large numbers, those young people reported being distressed, anxious, and frightened about climate change. They also reported that they felt betrayed by leaders who were failing to take action.

Our youth are looking to us to take action on climate change. One way to do that is to start a green team in your child’s school.

Action is the antidote to despair.” —Joan Baez

What Is a School Green Team?

A green team is simply a group of students that come together, either during or outside of school hours, to address environmental concerns. Green teams combine learning opportunities with action and field projects. Teams need an advisor — a parent, a teacher, or, ideally, both.

Don’t know the first thing about running a green team? Not to worry. There are numerous programs across the country that support green teams with resources and information.

For example, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) created their program, THE GREEN TEAM, as “an interactive educational program that empowers students and teachers to help the environment through waste reduction, reuse, recycling, composting, energy conservation and pollution prevention.” Many of their materials are available on their website.

Green Schools has a comprehensive list of green education programs in different states. Some even have a curriculum that aligns with learning standards.

How do you get a green team off the ground in your children’s school?

First Things First — Get Other Parents on Board

You can’t run a green team program by yourself. You need at least a couple of other parents in your corner. Do you know any other environmentally concerned parents who want to partner with you? Ask parents you know. Use social media to gauge interest beyond your own circle.

Partner With School Staff

Once you have a few people on board, check with your child’s school. Reach out to the school principal and ask what kinds of support they can give your team. Push for a staff liaison. Ideally, a staff member will be present at your team meetings. This is particularly important if you are hoping to implement changes within the school itself.

Keep the Focus on Children’s Interests

Before your first meeting, have the children fill out a form saying why they want to join the team. You’ll get a sense of where students’ interests lie. The great thing about kids is they don’t think in terms of limits — they want to fix everything now.

Your job as green team leader is to channel the students’ energy into projects where they can be effective change makers. We’ll talk about that more in a bit.

Build Positive Team Culture

To help your team work together constructively, you’ll need to establish a positive team culture. There are a few simple things you can do to achieve this.

• When you meet as a group, sit in a circle. Otherwise, students will focus on adults and not on one another.
• Encourage the group to learn one another’s names. Knowing someone’s name is the first step in building relationships.
• Establish some rules that everyone can agree on. Address how students speak to one another — not using put-downs, disagreeing respectfully, etc.
• Take time to process at the end of the meeting. Ask how the group how they feel about the work they did. What worked well? What could go better next time?

Teams with a supportive culture spend less time navigating conflicts and more on the work at hand.

Teach Children How To Set Reasonable Goals

We mentioned that children tend to think big. They’ll say things like:

• “I want to save the planet.”
• “We need to protect endangered animals.”
• “Everyone should stop polluting.”

Those ideas are great — we all want those things. But they are not achievable by this one team of students.

Teach your team about S.M.A.R.T. goals — goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Ask guiding questions like:

• What steps will we take to achieve our goal?
• How will we know we accomplished our goal?
• How will we communicate our goals to others?
• What will achieving our goal look like?

Rescuing the polar bears from extinction is not a S.M.A.R.T. goal. It’s too vague, it’s not measurable, and it’s not achievable. An example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal is reducing the school’s energy usage by 10%.

Projects Your Green Team Can Do

There are dozens and dozens of projects your green team can do to protect the environment and address climate change.

Here are some examples of projects that are measurable, specific, and achievable:

• Do a trash audit of the school. How much waste is being thrown out? Is the school recycling as much as it can? Reduce weekly trash weight by x number of pounds.
• Start a school composting program. Weigh how many pounds of waste the program is diverting from the landfill.
• Introduce the straw-free challenge. Educate the school community on why plastic straws are harmful. Keep track of how many straws are used in the cafeteria before and after education campaign.
• Launch a recycling collection program such as Trex or TerraCycle. TerraCycle will even let you earn rewards points that can be donated back to the school. Weigh items and track rewards.
• Organize a community clean-up. Measure the trash and report out to the community.
• Partner with local businesses to reduce single-use plastic bags. Make signs to hang in stores.

Starting a green team in your child’s school isn’t going to end climate change, but it’s a start. More importantly, it helps young people feel empowered to take action. Who knows where that will lead?

More green team projects and resources:

Food security – the consistent availability and affordability of food – is a basic human need, yet it remains elusive for billions of people around the world. The United Nations’ 2021 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, released in July, paints a grim picture of this reality: in 2020, nearly 1 in 3 people globally did not have enough to eat, up by more than 300 million people from the previous year.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt food systems and supply chains on a global scale, but the heart of the problem – and the solutions to it – are far more diverse than any single factor. In Kenya, climate change, water shortages, and land degradation jeopardize crops and rangelands. In Southeast Asia, rising temperatures, increasingly variable weather, and low water levels along the Mekong River threaten livelihoods and food production. In Nepal, areas reliant on rain-fed agriculture are extremely susceptible to drought, a phenomenon becoming more frequent in an ever-warming climate.

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There is no one-size-fits-all solution to these challenges; however, each region has a common ally: a fleet of Earth observing satellites working around the clock to take measurements of everything from snow melt and soil moisture to land cover and plant health. This data is the ultimate tool in building capacity within food systems – and is often the difference between anticipating drought with enough time to prepare or losing crops to lack of water.

Because each region’s infrastructure and challenges are unique, the trickier task is getting relevant data into the hands of the people who need it and in a way that is easily accessible.

Meet SERVIR

A joint NASA-USAID initiative called SERVIR is paving the way to do just that. The goals of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and NASA complement each other well: NASA uses the unique vantage point of space to look back at our home planet while USAID, working in over 100 countries, understands development needs from the ground level.

In addition to this expertise, SERVIR partners with leading regional organizations around the world to meet specific needs.

“Our model is very different than many traditional projects,” said Dan Irwin, SERVIR’s Global Program Manager based at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “Rather than building something and expecting it to be adopted, we collaborate hand-in-hand with people in the countries where we work to identify needs and implement sustainable solutions together.”

SERVIR works in more than 50 countries through five regional hubs. The hubs are entirely staffed by local experts, and each have their own partnerships with organizations working toward the same goals. What services and day-to-day operations look like depends on the specific needs identified and infrastructure present in each region.

Eastern and Southern Africa

Lilian Ndungu, Agriculture and Food Security Lead for SERVIR’s Eastern and Southern Africa hub, wears many hats. On any given day, she may go into the field in Kenya to collect data, consult with high level government officials on the co-development of services that improve food security, or head into the office to work on advocacy, technical program development and training programs.

More than half of the working population in the region works in agriculture in some capacity, mainly on small, family-run farms. Most of these farms are not irrigated and instead rely on rain, making them especially vulnerable to changes in climate and water availability.

With the right information, farmers and local governments can be proactive rather than reactive in their response to these challenges, and in doing so, improve food security. It is this information that Ndungu and SERVIR aim to provide. The Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) in Kenya, which hosts SERVIR’s Eastern and Southern Africa hub, helps bridge data and science with decision makers to support decision making processes that reduce risk.

“One project that has had an impact on food security in East Africa is our crop monitoring project,” Ndungu said. “Crop monitors are web-based portals that make it easy for non-technical people to access observational tools that incorporate satellite and ground data in order to make better agricultural decisions.”

Ndungu has lead the integration of these crop monitoring tools, developed by NASA Harvest researchers at the University of Maryland in close partnership with agricultural experts of the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor initiative, into crop monitor systems in Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia.

The tools – which incorporate satellite data on vegetation conditions, soil moisture, rainfall, and land use – produce localized maps of where plants are growing and how healthy they are. They can also indicate where and to what extent drought conditions may become problematic.

While the crop monitors are a success story, getting to the point where tools and services like this are widely implemented and sustainable – which is the ultimate goal –takes time.

“It takes a high level of engagement. You cannot just call someone in the government today and then call again in six months and expect to have made progress,” Ndungu said. “But through consistent communication and consultation, often over several years, you end up co-creating something that meets their needs and the buy-in and commitment to make it happen.”

In some areas, the SERVIR Eastern and Southern Africa hub is also working to get satellite and crop health data incorporated into crop insurance programs. Rather than having to inspect farms in person, stakeholders can assess the health of farms – and quickly identify areas in need of financial assistance – without needing to send staff into the field. In Kenya, this little bit of automation has already reduced the cost of providing crop insurance by 70%.

The Lower Mekong Basin

Nearly 5,000 miles away, in Southeast Asia’s Lower Mekong basin, food security and economic prosperity are largely contingent on a crop dubbed “white gold” by farmers: rice. In 2020 alone, the region — which includes Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam — exported $6.8 billion dollars’ worth of it.

“Rice is a very water-intensive crop. You need lots of water to grow it,” said Susantha Jayasinghe, Agriculture and Food Security Lead for SERVIR’s Mekong hub, hosted at the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center in Thailand. “What we learned from the countries and agencies working closely on agriculture and food security in the region is that they didn’t have a good information system to monitor and forecast drought and water availability, so this is where we began.”

Working closely with the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and other regional and national partners, SERVIR-Mekong brought together satellite imagery, ground-based measurements, and local expertise to produce water resource maps, drought forecasts, and other online data resources. These products help the MRC and other agencies prepare for and respond effectively to drought. They’re available at the regional level in several Lower Mekong countries and at the provincial level in Vietnam.

Moving forward, SERVIR-Mekong plans to expand the use of drought information tools to other provinces in Vietnam and other countries of the Lower Mekong Region—and they hope to use even more enhanced technology to do it.

“NASA has planned a new water monitoring satellite called Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT),” said Ankit Joshi, SERVIR-Mekong’s Communications Lead. “SWOT’s higher resolution sensors will enable SERVIR-Mekong to improve forecast accuracy using more granular data thereby providing better insights to policymakers and farmers.”

SWOT is being jointly developed by NASA and Centre National D’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and United Kingdom Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the U.S. component of the project which is scheduled to launch in 2022. SERVIR-Mekong is ready to be one of the earliest users of its data.

The Himalayas

The remote countries in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush (“HKH”) mountain ranges have been experiencing worsening drought conditions over the past few decades – and climate change isn’t helping. But, by fostering drought resilience, SERVIR-HKH, hosted by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Nepal is.

“Our main focus is on drought monitoring and assessing drought impacts on crops,” said Faisal Qamar, Agriculture and Food Security Lead for SERVIR-HKH. “We combine data from satellites with water system models and weather forecasts to create a framework for forecasting drought in the region.”

This SERVIR hub works with governments and stakeholders in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, among others. Each country has a different approach to managing agriculture, so the design and communication of the product must be tailored to the specific needs of each country.

“We have to be persistent, and to work with teams within the governments, and then prove how the use of satellite information is better than the traditional way in terms of the quality of the information and the value of money,” said Mir Matin, the hub’s Geospatial Solutions Lead. “Having a tool become mainstream requires substantial investment so partnerships and capacity building are important.”

To build capacity, the hub offers on-the-job training to partners on the development and application of products and tools. They train staff from other agencies to use these services and work to link their products with multilateral agencies for greater uptake and sustainability. The hub also offers trainings through schools and universities – including programs aimed at increasing the equity and role of women in agricultural solutions.

“Connecting space to village,” an apt motto for SERVIR, highlights how the program provides stakeholders with specialized information to make the best possible decisions in the face of ever-growing environmental challenges. Making the right decisions now will bring us one step closer to a food secure future.

News Media Contacts

Jane J. Lee / Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 818-354-2649
[email protected] / [email protected]

In a case study of Northern California residents, Stanford researchers explored the psychological factors and social processes that drive responses to wildfire smoke. The research, which ultimately aims to uncover approaches for helping people better protect themselves, shows that social norms and social support are essential for understanding protective health actions during wildfire smoke events. The findings appeared this month in the journal Climate Risk Management.

“It’s important to understand how people behave so that public health communications professionals can potentially intervene and promote safer behavior that mitigates risk,” said lead study author Francisca Santana, a PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER). “This kind of qualitative work is a first step so that we can learn how people are using information and interacting to make decisions. We can then look at where there might be leverage points or opportunities to promote more protective behavior.”

Exposure to wildfire smoke can irritate the lungs, cause inflammation, impact the immune system and increase susceptibility to lung infections, including the virus that causes COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While other studies have examined how people respond to evacuation orders, little has been done to understand what’s happening with wildfire smoke exposure if people don’t — or can’t — leave the area, according to senior study author Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

“It resonated with me, the things that people were doing to try to protect themselves in the absence of access to effective ways to reduce their wildfire smoke exposure,” Wong-Parodi said, referring to a resident who breathed through a wet bandana in an attempt to filter out toxic smoke particles. “It’s urgent that we come up with strategies that are realistic for what people are going through.”

Study authors Santana and David Gonzalez, who worked on the study as a PhD student at Stanford, interviewed residents across age, race and income demographics who were affected by wildfire smoke from the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, and subsequent fires in 2019 in Fresno, Santa Clara and Sacramento counties.

They found that individuals responded to wildfire smoke events in three main ways: interpreting information together, protecting vulnerable others and questioning protective actions. Their responses were influenced not only by the Air Quality Index (AQI) but also by what they were personally experiencing — whether they smelled, saw or tasted smoke in the air.

Just as important were the social factors at play, the researchers found. “Social norms and social support were really influencing how people chose to act on their perceptions of threat,” Santana said. “For example, a lot of people talked about observing others wearing masks, and in some cases that observation was enough for them to act by wearing a mask themselves.”

Their discussions revealed that the shared rules or standards of behavior within a social group — social norms — were a common pathway driving behavior change, in addition to the act of assisting or comforting others within your social group — social support.

“There were only a handful of people who described looking at the AQI and then changing their behavior based on just that — it was almost always a conversation they were having with one another,” Santana said. “It was very much a social exercise of making sense of limited information or information that was not at the right scale for their community.”

The study provides a framework for better understanding wildfire smoke responses by examining social processes while acknowledging that cultural and political contexts, as well as factors like demographics, health status and previous exposure to smoke and air pollution, may also influence individual behaviors.

In the western U.S., climate change has contributed to the risk and extent of wildfires, bringing smoke to regions like the Bay Area, which has historically been less affected than the rest of the state. In some cases, the researchers found that residents were unable to protect themselves because they couldn’t access N95 masks or air purifiers or properly seal their homes.

“This research is also important for epidemiologists trying to understand how wildfire smoke affects health,” said Gonzalez, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “This can help us to look at disparities in who’s exposed to smoke and whether that leads to poorer health for some populations.”

As these events become more common, there could be an opportunity to find policy synergies that help prepare communities for future smoke events, according to the co-authors. For example, programs that are designed to improve household comfort and increase energy efficiency could also include measures to reduce smoke intrusion during wildfire smoke events, Wong-Parodi suggested.

Some of the interviews revealed that residents simply didn’t know what to do while experiencing a novel extreme event. But even that revealed how processing uncertainty is a social exercise, not just a cognitive one.

“This piece shows that social norms may be an effective lever for encouraging the pro-health change that we’d like to see,” Wong-Parodi said. “That is actually a really promising sign for thinking about how to adapt and mitigate our risk as we’re facing increasing threats from climate change.”

“There wasn’t an onset of an imbalance until about 1990, which is later than most estimates,” said DeVries, an associate professor in the Department of Geography, and a co-author on a paper that appears in the journal Nature Communications. According to the study, the period from 1950 to1990 saw temperature fluctuations in the water column but no net warming. After 1990, the study continues, the entire water column switched from cooling to warming.

These findings are the result of the addition of a largely underexplored factor in ocean heat content (OHC): deep ocean temperatures.

“Prior studies didn’t consider the deep ocean,” said Bagnell, a graduate scholar in DeVries’ laboratory and the paper’s lead author. Because of the challenges involved in getting temperature measurements in the deep ocean (below 2,000 meters) that region has gone largely unaccounted for, and data has been sparse. “There is some existing data, from research cruises and autonomous floats,” he added.

The researchers used an autoregressive artificial neural network (ARANN) and machine learning methods to connect the dots between data points and “produce a single consistent estimate of the top-to-bottom OHC change for 1946 to 2019.” The result was a trend that delays warming by decades over previous models.

There are two main possibilities for why the effects of global warming took so long to reach the ocean, De Vries said.

“One is that anthropogenic warming might have been weaker than previously thought during the 20th century, perhaps due to the cooling effects of aerosol pollution,” he said. The other is that the deep ocean may still be exhibiting the effects of climate events long past.

“It can take centuries for climate signals to propagate from the surface to the interior,” he said. Thus, the effects of a cooling event such as the Little Ice Age might be deep history to us on the surface, but the echoes of the event may have continued to resonate in the deep ocean into the 20^th century, providing a buffer to the warming Earth.

The delayed cooling effect ended in 1990, after which ocean temperatures, according to the study, have been accelerating upward.

“The lag is catching up and the ocean is warming more strongly now,” Bagnell said. The Atlantic Ocean and Southern Ocean are currently where most of the warming is, with the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean not far behind.

Ocean warming is a concern on many levels, as it can cause changes in circulation, reduce its ability to absorb carbon and fuel more intense storms, in addition to causing sea level rise and creating inhospitable environments for undersea life. If the trend continues, the effects might last centuries, thanks to the same lag that kept the oceans cool until the last 30 years.

“The ocean remembers,” DeVries said.

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Materials provided by University of California – Santa Barbara. Original written by Sonia Fernandez. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.