The report titled “The essential drop to reach Net-Zero: Unpacking Freshwater’s Role in Climate Change Mitigation,” released today, is the first-ever summary of current research on the role of water in climate mitigation. A key message is the need to better understand global water shortages and scarcity in order to plan climate targets that do not backfire in future. If not planned carefully, negative impacts of climate action on freshwater resources might threaten water security and even increase future adaptation and mitigation burdens.

“Most of the measures needed to reach net-zero carbon targets can have a big impact on already dwindling freshwater resources around the world,” said Dr Lan Wang Erlandsson from Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. “With better planning, such risks can be reduced or avoided.”

The report describes why, where, and how freshwater should be integrated into climate change mitigation plans to avoid unexpected consequences and costly policy mistakes. Even efforts usually associated with positive climate action — such as forest restoration or bioenergy — can have negative impacts if water supplies are not considered.

Done right, however, water-related and nature-based solutions can instead address both the climate crisis and other challenges, said Dr Malin Lundberg Ingemarsson from Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

“We have identified water risks, but also win-win solutions that are currently not used to their full potential. One example is restoration of forests and wetlands which bring social, ecological, and climate benefits all at once. Another example is that better wastewater treatment can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from untreated wastewater, while improving surface water and groundwater quality, and even provide renewable energy through biogas.”

The report highlights five key messages on the interlinkage between water and mitigation:

• Climate mitigation measures depend on freshwater resources. Climate mitigation planning and action need to account for current and future freshwater availability.

• Freshwater impacts — both positive and negative — need to be evaluated and included in climate mitigation planning and action.

• Water and sanitation management can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More efficient drinking water and sanitation services save precious freshwater resources and reduce emissions.

• Nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change can deliver multiple benefits for people and the environment. Measures safeguarding freshwater resources, protecting biodiversity, and ensuring resilient livelihoods are crucial.

• Joint water and climate governance need to be coordinated and strengthened. Mainstreaming freshwater in all climate mitigation planning and action requires polycentric and inclusive governance.

“Climate change mitigation efforts will not succeed if failing to consider water needs,” said Marianne Kjellén, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). “Water must be part of powerful solutions for enhancing ecosystem resilience, preserving biodiversity and regenerative food and energy production systems. In short, water security needs to be factored in to climate action,” she adds.

“To tackle the climate, food, nature, and energy crises, water availability is of the essence. It is urgent that the world focuses all attention on the double facts that water is the number one challenge for climate adaptation due to droughts and floods, and a key challenge for mitigation, as there is no safe climate future well below 2 degrees Celsius without a functioning hydrological cycle,” Professor Johan Rockström, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, concludes.

Further information: https://siwi.org/publications/essential-drop-to-net-zero-unpacking-freshwaters-role-in-climate-change-mitigation-report/

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Materials provided by Stockholm University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

From Lake Pontchartrain to the Texas border, Louisiana has lost enough wetlands since the mid-1950s to cover the entire state of Rhode Island. Using a first-of-its-kind model, NASA-funded researchers quantified those wetlands losses at nearly 21 square miles (54 square kilometers) per year since the early 1980s.

In the new study, scientists used the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat satellite record to track shoreline changes across Louisiana from 1984 to 2020. Some of those wetlands were submerged by rising seas; others were disrupted by oil and gas infrastructure and hurricanes. But the primary driver of losses was coastal and river engineering, which can have positive or negative effects depending on how it is implemented.

Centimeter-by-centimeter, wetlands are built by the slow accumulation – accretion – of mineral sediment and organic material carried by rivers and streams. Accretion makes new soil and counters erosion, the sinking of land, and the rise of sea level.

Human intervention and engineering often hold back or divert the flow of sediments that naturally accrete to build and replenish wetlands. For instance, reinforced levees and thousands of miles of canals and excavated banks have isolated many wetlands from the Mississippi River and the network of streams that course through its delta like veins and capillaries. In a few cases, engineering projects have added sediment to delta areas and built new land.

By analyzing Landsat imagery with tools from cloud computing, the researchers developed a remote sensing model that focused on accretion or the lack of it. Basins that failed to build new soil, such as Terrebonne and Barataria, experienced the most land loss over the study period — more than 180 square miles (466 square kilometers). Other areas gained ground, including 33.6 square miles (87 square kilometers) of new land in the Atchafalaya Basin and 43 square miles (112 square kilometers) in the area known as the “Bird’s Foot Delta” at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

“The Louisiana coastal system is highly engineered,” said Daniel Jensen, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But the fact that ground has been gained in some places indicates that, with enough restoration efforts to reintroduce fresh water supply and sediment, we could see some wetland recovery in the future.”

Understanding wetland dieback and recovery is critically important because the Mississippi River Delta, like many of the world’s deltas, drives local and national economies through farming, fisheries, tourism, and shipping. “For the 350 million people who live and farm on deltas around the world, coastal wetlands provide a key link in the food chain,” said JPL’s Marc Simard, principal investigator of NASA’s Delta-X mission and co-author of the paper.

In several airborne and field campaigns since 2016, the Delta-X research team has been studying the Mississippi River Delta, the seventh largest on Earth, using airborne sensing and field measurements of water, vegetation, and sediment changes in the face of rising sea level. The Landsat analysis builds on this airborne mission. Delta-X is part of NASA’s Earth Venture Suborbital (EVS) program, managed at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

The new model by Jensen and colleagues is the first to directly estimate soil accretion rates in coastal wetlands using satellite data. Working with ground-based accretion records from Louisiana’s Coastwide Reference Monitoring System, the scientists were able to estimate amounts of mineral sediment from water pixels in the Landsat imagery and organic material from the land pixels.

The researchers said their approach could be applied beyond Louisiana because wetland loss and resiliency is a global phenomenon. From the Great Lakes to the Nile Delta, the Amazon to Siberia, wetlands are found on every continent except Antarctica. And they are declining in most places. Wetlands were recently called some of the “most vulnerable, most threatened, most valuable, and most diverse” ecosystems on the planet, according to an international analysis co-authored by NASA researchers.

But they also said a new generation of spaceborne tools, such as synthetic aperture radar, can increasingly inform conservation policies on the ground. This is because satellites support near-continuous mapping of ecosystems at a scale and consistency that is nearly impossible through traditional surveys and field work.

The futures of our wetlands and coastal communities are intertwined with climate change, so sustainable management is critical. By storing decomposing plant matter in soil and roots, wetlands act as “blue carbon” sinks, preventing some greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and methane) from escaping into the atmosphere. When vegetation dies, drowns, and fails to grow back, wetlands can no longer sequester (bury) carbon in soil and vegetation. At current rates of wetland loss in coastal Louisiana, carbon burial may have decreased 50% from 2013 estimates.

“Forty percent of the human population lives within a hundred kilometers of a coast,” Simard said. “It’s critical that we understand the processes that protect those lands and the livelihood of the people living there.”

Learn more about the Delta-X mission:

https://deltax.jpl.nasa.gov

News Media Contacts

Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874

[email protected] / [email protected]

The research spearheaded by Scott Evans, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geosciences, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science, shows this earliest mass extinction of about 80 percent of animals across this interval. “This included the loss of many different types of animals, however those whose body plans and behaviors indicate that they relied on significant amounts of oxygen seem to have been hit particularly hard,” Evans said. “This suggests that the extinction event was environmentally controlled, as are all other mass extinctions in the geologic record.”

Evans’ work was published Nov. 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was co-authored by Shuhai Xiao, also a professor in the Department of Geosciences, and several researchers led by Mary Droser from the University of California Riverside’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where Evans earned his master’s degree and Ph.D.

“Environmental changes, such as global warming and deoxygenation events, can lead to massive extinction of animals and profound disruption and reorganization of the ecosystem,” said Xiao, who is an affiliated member of the Global Change Center, part of the Virginia Tech Fralin Life Sciences Institute. “This has been demonstrated repeatedly in the study of Earth history, including this work on the first extinction documented in the fossil record. This study thus informs us about the long-term impact of current environmental changes on the biosphere.”

What exactly caused the drop in global oxygen? That’s still up for debate. “The short answer to how this happened is we don’t really know,” Evans said. “It could be any number and combination of volcanic eruptions, tectonic plate motion, an asteroid impact, etc., but what we see is that the animals that go extinct seem to be responding to decreased global oxygen availability.”

The study by Evans and Xiao is timelier than one would think. In an unconnected study, Virginia Tech scientists recently found that anoxia, the loss of oxygen availability, is affecting the world’s fresh waters. The cause? The warming of waters brought on by climate change and excess pollutant runoff from land use. Warming waters diminish fresh water’s capacity to hold oxygen, while the breakdown of nutrients in runoff by freshwater microbes gobbles up oxygen.

“Our study shows that, as with all other mass extinctions in Earth’s past, this new, first mass extinction of animals was caused by major climate change — another in a long list of cautionary tales demonstrating the dangers of our current climate crisis for animal life,” said Evans, who is an Agouron Institute Geobiology fellow.

Some perspective: The Ediacaran Period spanned roughly 96 million years, bookended on either side by the end of Cryogenian Period — 635 million years ago — and the beginning of the Cambrian Period — 539 million years ago. The extinction event comes just before a significant break in the geologic record, from the Proterozoic Eon to the Phanerozoic Eon.

There are five known mass extinctions that stand out in the history of animals, the “Big Five,” according to Xiao, including the Ordovician-Silurian Extinction (440 million years ago), the late Devonian Extinction (370 million years ago), the Permian-Triassic Extinction (250 million years ago), the Triassic-Jurassic Extinction (200 million years ago), and the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction (65 million years ago).

“Mass extinctions are well recognized as significant steps in the evolutionary trajectory of life on this planet,” Evans and team wrote in the study. Whatever the instigating cause of the mass extinction, the result was multiple major shifts in environmental conditions. “Particularly, we find support for decreased global oxygen availability as the mechanism responsible for this extinction. This suggests that abiotic controls have had significant impacts on diversity patterns throughout the more than 570 million-year history of animals on this planet,” the authors wrote.

Fossil imprints in rock tell researchers how the creatures that perished in this extinction event would have looked. And they looked, in Evans’ words, “weird.”

“These organisms occur so early in the evolutionary history of animals that in many cases they appear to be experimenting with different ways to build large, sometimes mobile, multicellular bodies,” Evans said. “There are lots of ways to recreate how they look, but the take-home is that before this extinction the fossils we find don’t often fit nicely into the ways we classify animals today. Essentially, this extinction may have helped pave the way for the evolution of animals as we know them.”

The study, like scores of other recent publications, came out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because Evans, Xiao, and their team couldn’t get access to the field, they decided to put together a global database based mostly on published records to test ideas about changing diversity. “Others had suggested that there might be an extinction at this time, but there was a lot of speculation. So we decided to put together everything we could to try and test those ideas.” Evans said. Much of the data used in the study was collected by Droser and several graduate students from the University of California Riverside.

The study, published in JAMA Network Open on Wednesday, Nov. 2, examined the relationship between heat exposure and mortality risks in Texas prisons, focusing on how these risks vary between prisons with air conditioning and those without it.

The researchers analyzed data gathered between 2001 and 2019 showing that 271 people died due to extreme heat exposure during that timeframe.

Even a 1 degree increase above 85 degrees Fahrenheit can elevate the daily risk of dying by 0.7%, the researchers found.

The research team — which in addition to Brown also included scholars from Harvard University, Boston University and the organization Texas Prison Community Advocates — combined data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics on mortality in Texas prisons with temperature data from NASA and used a novel epidemiologic analysis to arrive at its findings. The team reported that approximately 13% of mortality during warm months may be attributable to extreme in Texas prison facilities without air conditioning.

It is important to note that while an average of 14 people died each year from heat-related causes in Texas prisons without air conditioning, not a single heat-related death occurred in climate-controlled prisons, said lead study author Julie Skarha, who received her Ph.D. in epidemiology from Brown in June 2022.

“The majority of Texas prisons do not have universal air conditioning,” Skarha said. “And in these settings, we found a 30-fold increase in heat-related mortality when compared to estimates of heat-related mortality in the general U.S. population.”

Study co-author Dr. David Dosa, an associate professor of medicine, and health services, policy and practice at Brown, pointed out that heat is often a silent killer.

“We have seen similar situations in nursing homes, where heat isn’t reported on the death certificate,” said Dosa, a practicing geriatrician with dual appointments at the Providence V.A. Medical Center and Rhode Island Hospital. “It’s only after we run these analyses that we can determine how much of a role heat played in someone’s death.”

The findings, the researchers said, suggest that an air conditioning policy for Texas prisons may be an important part of protecting the health of people living and working in these facilities.

Other study authors included Dr. Josiah Rich and David Savitz from Brown, Amite Dominick from Texas Prison Community Advocates, Keith Spangler from Boston University and Antonella Zanobetti from Harvard. The study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

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Materials provided by Brown University. Original written by Carl Dimitri, Senior Writer, School of Public Health. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

From the window of a NASA Gulfstream III research aircraft, Alaska looks like a pristine wilderness untouched by humans. The land is covered in lush, green vegetation and dotted with bright blue lakes. Snow-capped mountains reach toward the sky, and chocolate milk-colored rivers snake across the landscape. The obvious signs of human activity – cities, roads, infrastructure – are hard to spot.

But upon closer inspection, some hints of human-induced change appear to the eye. Sunken pockets of land. Abnormally tilted trees. Ponds where there used to be dry ground. Through the eyes of scientists collecting data from the ground and the air, the signal is clear: The Arctic is being affected by climate change more than most places on Earth. Since 2015, scientists participating in NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) have been studying the impacts of climate change on Earth’s far northern regions and how those changes are intertwined.

“ABoVE is a large-scale study of environmental change, not just climate change,” said Peter Griffith, a carbon cycle researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and one of the leaders of ABoVE. “And we’re doing this as only NASA can: by studying this region from leaf to orbit.”

Previous field and airborne campaigns focused on things like changes in plant cover and shifting animal migration patterns. In the summer of 2022, the team investigated permafrost thaw, methane emissions from lakes, and the effects of wildfires in Alaska and northwestern Canada. They did this with instruments observing from research aircraft and with scientists collecting measurements on the ground.

Studying Arctic Changes from Air and Space

One of the key components of ABoVE is the airborne campaign, which uses research aircraft like the NASA Gulfstream III airplane. This year the plane was mounted with the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, which sends out pulses of radio waves that reflect off of Earth’s surface and give scientists an accurate idea of the shape of the land and water surfaces below – even when looking through clouds or thick vegetation.

Each year members of the ABoVE team fly over their field sites, as well as wildfire burn scars and other areas of scientific interest, allowing them to compare measurements taken from both the air and ground. They also revisit sites from year to year to see how the landscapes evolve over time.

UAVSAR is similar to the main instrument on an upcoming satellite. The NASA-ISRO (NISAR) satellite will be a joint mission between the Indian Space Research Organization and NASA to observe Earth’s land and ice. NISAR is also part of NASA’s upcoming Earth System Observatory.

“ABoVE and UAVSAR give the research community a really good example of what NISAR data will look like and what kind of science they can extract from these datasets,” explained Franz Meyer, a NISAR science team member who also is the chief scientist of the Alaska Satellite Facility in Fairbanks.

NISAR will collect data globally and year-round, allowing research groups like the ABoVE team to study critical processes – the development of methane emission hotspots, how and where permafrost is thawing, long-term consequences of wildfires – even when they can’t be there in person.

Thawing Permafrost is Making New Lakes, New Methane Hotspots

Permafrost – layers of soil that have stayed frozen for at least two years – underlie much of Alaska and northwestern Canada. In some areas, especially within the Arctic Circle, the landscape is rich with permafrost. In others, this frozen soil is found in patches. Either way, it has mostly stayed frozen for thousands of years.

But as our planet warms, permafrost is thawing at an accelerating rate. This is changing the shape and vegetation of landscapes and, in some cases, creating new ponds and lakes that are also hotspots for greenhouse gas emissions.

When the hard, frozen permafrost layer warms, it changes into softer, spongier ground. That mushy ground sinks and can damage roads, houses, and other infrastructure sitting on top of it. In some areas like interior Alaska, the permafrost layer also contains large chunks of ice. As permafrost thaws and this ice melts, the resulting sinkholes can fill with the meltwater and form new ponds and lakes.

The warmer temperatures that cause permafrost to thaw also increase the activity of microbes that digest dead plants and other thawed organic matter. This microbial decay releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas that bubbles to the lake surface and enters the atmosphere.

This thawing process is happening all over Alaska and northwestern Canada, which already has millions of lakes and ponds. But most of these lakes are hundreds or thousands of years old, meaning the microbes have run out of organic matter to decompose and the lakes are no longer releasing significant amounts of methane.

In 2022, the ABoVE team closely examined Big Trail Lake, just outside of Fairbanks. “Lakes like Big Trail are new, young, and important because they are what’s going to happen in the future as the climate changes and permafrost thaws,” said Katey Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks working with the ABoVE team.

Arctic and Boreal Fires are Becoming More Extreme

Year-to-year observations from the sky and the ground are especially important for understanding the evolving impacts of wildfires on Arctic and boreal landscape. Fires have long been a natural part of these ecosystems. But as Earth’s climate changes, wildfires in these areas are becoming larger, more frequent, and more severe. This can make it difficult for ecosystems to recover after a fire – changing the plants that grow back and accelerating permafrost thaw.

Fires in Alaska and northwestern Canada can be different from those in the continental United States. Sometimes the ground itself burns, as the soft, peaty layer of soil and organic material above the permafrost layer is flammable. Also, fires in remote areas are usually left to burn themselves out unless they threaten houses or other infrastructure. This gives scientists a “natural experiment” to see how fire runs its course.

“These tundra fires are so rare that we don’t always get a great opportunity to study them,” said Liz Hoy, a wildfire researcher at NASA Goddard and one of the lead scientists for ABoVE.

For several years, the ABoVE team has flown over recent wildland fires. For instance, the team flew over the site of the 2019 Shovel Creek Fire and the 2021 Yankovich Road Fire before and after they burned. Such repeat flights allow scientists to see the immediate impact of wildfire and how the ecosystems respond. This year the team flew over the site of the Contact Creek Fire, which burned in late May 2022 in a largely treeless tundra near Katmai National Park in Alaska.

The ABoVE team is interested in not only in the local impacts on the ecosystems, but also how the fires may be caused by or contribute to climate change.

If you live in the northern United States, the growing season is coming to a close. So, if you want locally grown food available throughout the winter, it’s beneficial to store fall produce, such as potatoes, squash, and apples. Certainly, freezing, canning, pickling, and dehydrating are useful methods for preserving the garden harvest, but not everyone wants to take on those projects. So, let’s explore alternative ways to store the fall harvest for the winter months ahead.

Best Veggies and Fruits for Winter Storage

Not all veggies and fruits are created equal when it comes to storage heartiness, and some are much better suited than others. For example, leafy greens, such as lettuce and spinach, do not store well and it’s best to dry or freeze legumes and peas.

The first step in preserving the fall harvest involves growing or buying the best types of vegetables and fruits for storage. These include:

• Apples
• Beets
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Garlic
• Leeks
• Onions
• Parsnips
• Pears
• Potatoes
• Pumpkins
• Radishes
• Sweet potatoes
• Winter squash

There is a wide variety of winter squash, and some varieties store well for longer periods than others. For example, acorn, delicata, spaghetti, and sweet dumpling squash can store for a couple of months, while buttercup, hubbard, kabocha, and butternut can keep for up to five or six months.

Of the tree fruits, apples and pears are definitely your best bet. However, avoid softer varieties because they are more likely to bruise, which will cause them to rot.

Some excellent storage apple varieties include:

• Cameo
• Fuji
• Gala
• Golden Delicious
• Goldrush
• Granny Smith
• Honeycrisp
• Ida Red
• McIntosh
• Red Delicious
• Rome

Storing Fall Harvest in a Root Cellar (or Cool Location)

If you are lucky enough to have a root cellar, this is a great way to conserve energy while preserving the fall harvest. It’s useful to learn about which conditions are best for storing different types of produce, as they all like slightly different humidity levels, temperatures, and other conditions. Here are some tips to get you started.

• “Cure” potatoes, winter squash, onions, and pumpkins for a few days in warm temperatures before placing them in the root cellar. This allows their skin to thicken, making them more storage hardy.
• Avoid storing any veggies while they are wet because it makes them more susceptible to mold and rot. Instead of washing your produce, brush off loose dirt before storing it.
• Space out veggies on shelves to allow air circulation and avoid spoilage. Consider using shallow boxes and storing produce in a single layer. Some produce, including beets and carrots, store well when placed in sand or sawdust.
• If possible, wrap apples and pears individually with paper to help prevent them from spoiling.
• Store potatoes in a dark place to prevent them from turning green.
• Cut the green tops off and pack beets, carrots, turnips, radishes, and rutabagas in damp sand or sawdust so they don’t touch.
• Check on your produce often and remove any items that show signs of rot to prevent it from spreading.
• Deter mice and other rodents from eating your harvest by plugging holes where they could enter your home.

How To Store Produce if You Don’t Have a Root Cellar

It is possible to store fall veggies, pears, and apples in other places, such as a garage, a closet on an outside wall, or a cool room in your home. Ideally, you want the room to be below 60° F but above freezing. If temperatures temporarily dip below freezing, using a picnic cooler might protect them.

Some squash stores relatively well at room temperature. One option is to display them for a splash of color in your home until you’re ready to eat them.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac recommends making a root clamp to store fall veggies in the garden without allowing them to freeze. “Instead of building a root cellar, just dig out holes in the hard ground to store cabbages, potatoes, and other root vegetables. Use hay in between each vegetable. Cover with a thick layer of straw, and then the dirt to keep out any frost. Then cover with more straw (a bale or two).”

Other gardeners report success with keeping carrots in the garden bed, trimming off the tops, and insulating them with 12 inches of mulch. This takes a somewhat similar approach to the root clamp by insulating the harvest with natural materials.

Storing Fall Produce for Greater Resiliency

Regardless of which options you use, avoiding the use of electricity for storing food helps increase your resiliency. If you are in an area prone to power outages, it will help you prevent food from spoiling. Also, reducing your reliance on electricity and eating locally grown foods conserves energy and helps you reduce your carbon footprint. And don’t forget to enjoy your bounty with some delicious fall recipes.

Rainbows are produced when water droplets refract sunlight. Sunlight and rainfall are therefore essential ingredients for rainbows. Human activities such as burning fossil fuels are warming the atmosphere, which changes patterns and amounts of rainfall and cloud cover.

“Living in Hawai’i, I felt grateful that stunning, ephemeral rainbows were a part of my daily life,” said the lead author of the study, Kimberly Carlson, who is now at New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies. “I wondered how climate change might affect such rainbow viewing opportunities.”

Camilo Mora, at the UH Manoa Geography and Environment department, was intrigued by the question and pitched it as the focus of a project for one of his graduate courses.

According to Mora, “We often study how climate change directly affects people’s health and livelihoods, for instance via the occurrence of heat stroke during climate change-enhanced heat waves.”

However, few researchers have examined how climate change might affect the aesthetic qualities of our environment, and no one had bothered to map rainbow occurrences, much less under climate change.

To answer this question, a team including students at UH Manoa looked at photographs uploaded to Flickr, a social media platform where people share photographs. They sorted through tens of thousands of photos taken around the world, labeled with the word “rainbow,” to identify rainbows generated from the refraction of light by rain droplets.

Amanda Wong, then an undergraduate student in Global Environmental Science in the UH Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) and a co-author on the paper, noted, “We had to sort through photos of rainbow artwork, rainbow flags, rainbow trout, rainbow eucalyptus, and rainbow foods to find the real rainbows.”

Then, the scientists trained a rainbow prediction model based on rainbow photo locations and maps of precipitation, cloud cover, and sun angle. Finally, they applied their model to predict present day and future rainbow occurrences over global land areas. The model suggests that islands are rainbow hotspots.

“Islands are the best places to view rainbows,” according to Steven Businger, professor of Atmospheric Sciences in SOEST. “This is because island terrain lifts the air during daily sea breezes, producing localized showers surrounded by clear skies that let the sun in to produce majestic rainbows.”

The Hawaiian Islands, recently dubbed the “rainbow capital of the world,” are predicted to experience a few more days with rainbows per year. The authors stopped short of discussing how changes in rainbow occurrence might affect human wellbeing. However, rainbows are an important part of human culture throughout history and around the world and are aesthetically pleasing.

“Climate change will generate pervasive changes across all aspects of the human experience on Earth. Shifts in intangible parts of our environment — such as sound and light — are part of these changes and deserve more attention from researchers,” said Carlson.

In this case, the overall findings are encouraging — it seems people will have more opportunities to make a rainbow connection under climate change.

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Materials provided by University of Hawaii at Manoa. Original written by Marcie Grabowski. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In recent years, this on-the-ground work has received a big boost from what might seem to be an unlikely source: NASA.

In a new scholarly paper that details research in northwest Wyoming, University of Wyoming researchers explain how NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission can provide valuable information about the world’s forests for wildlife scientists. The article appears in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.

Using a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) laser instrument installed on the International Space Station, GEDI collects high-resolution observations of the three-dimensional structure of Earth’s forest — including precise measurements of forest canopy height, canopy cover and vertical structure. GEDI was attached to the International Space Station in 2018 for a two-year mission that has been extended until January 2023; it is expected to collect over 10 billion samples of Earth’s tropical and temperate forests.

“Our work indicated that spaceborne LiDAR collected from the GEDI mission provided a ready sampling of forest structure that could be combined with other remotely sensed data to improve our understanding of animal-habitat relationships,” wrote the researchers, led by Austin Smith, now an assistant research scientist for the team of Assistant Professor Joe Holbrook in UW’s Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources.

Working in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem — including two national parks, parts of three national forests, one national wildlife refuge and Bureau of Land Management land — the researchers deployed 107 camera traps for three consecutive winters. Based on photographs of target species, they calculated habitat use for Pacific martens, Rocky Mountain red foxes and coyotes, along with prey species red squirrels and snowshoe hares.

The scientists then paired data from GEDI with other remote-sensing platforms to create forest height and structure maps, which they used to run computer models to evaluate animal-environment relationships. They found that the pairing of GEDI data with other sensors resulted in a substantial improvement in characterizing vertical and horizontal forest structure, which aided efforts to understand important habitat features for the animals studied.

“Our successes are likely transferrable to other landscapes and animal species, which is important given the large-scale disturbances that are occurring in Western forests, such as wildfire and bark beetle outbreaks,” the researchers say.

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Materials provided by University of Wyoming. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Watch video of EMIT’s launch and “first light”

NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission is mapping the prevalence of key minerals in the planet’s dust-producing deserts – information that will advance our understanding of airborne dust’s effects on climate. But EMIT has demonstrated another crucial capability: detecting the presence of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

In the data EMIT has collected since being installed on the International Space Station in July, the science team has identified more than 50 “super-emitters” in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States. Super-emitters are facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure, typically in the fossil-fuel, waste, or agriculture sectors, that emit methane at high rates.

“Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming. This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed – quickly,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “The International Space Station and NASA’s more than two dozen satellites and instruments in space have long been invaluable in determining changes to the Earth’s climate. EMIT is proving to be a critical tool in our toolbox to measure this potent greenhouse gas – and stop it at the source.”

Methane absorbs infrared light in a unique pattern – called a spectral fingerprint – that EMIT’s imaging spectrometer can discern with high accuracy and precision. The instrument can also measure carbon dioxide.

The new observations stem from the broad coverage of the planet afforded by the space station’s orbit, as well as from EMIT’s ability to scan swaths of Earth’s surface dozens of miles wide while resolving areas as small as a soccer field.

“These results are exceptional, and they demonstrate the value of pairing global-scale perspective with the resolution required to identify methane point sources, down to the facility scale,” said David Thompson, EMIT’s instrument scientist and a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “It’s a unique capability that will raise the bar on efforts to attribute methane sources and mitigate emissions from human activities.”

Relative to carbon dioxide, methane makes up a fraction of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, but it’s estimated to be 80 times more effective, ton for ton, at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the 20 years after release. Moreover, where carbon dioxide lingers for centuries, methane persists for about a decade, meaning that if emissions are reduced, the atmosphere will respond in a similar timeframe, leading to slower near-term warming.

Identifying methane point sources can be a key step in the process. With knowledge of the locations of big emitters, operators of facilities, equipment, and infrastructure giving off the gas can quickly act to limit emissions.

EMIT’s methane observations came as scientists verified the accuracy of the imaging spectrometer’s mineral data. Over its mission, EMIT will collect measurements of surface minerals in arid regions of Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Australia. The data will help researchers better understand airborne dust particles’ role in heating and cooling Earth’s atmosphere and surface.

“We have been eager to see how EMIT’s mineral data will improve climate modeling,” said Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor. “This additional methane-detecting capability offers a remarkable opportunity to measure and monitor greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.”

Detecting Methane Plumes

The mission’s study area coincides with known methane hotspots around the world, enabling researchers to look for the gas in those regions to test the capability of the imaging spectrometer.

“Some of the plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen – unlike anything that has ever been observed from space,” said Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at JPL leading the EMIT methane effort. “What we’ve found in a just a short time already exceeds our expectations.”

For example, the instrument detected a plume about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) long southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin. One of the largest oilfields in the world, the Permian spans parts of southeastern New Mexico and western Texas.

In Turkmenistan, EMIT identified 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar. Blowing to the west, some plumes stretch more than 20 miles (32 kilometers).

The team also identified a methane plume south of Tehran, Iran, at least 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) long, from a major waste-processing complex. Methane is a byproduct of decomposition, and landfills can be a major source.

Scientists estimate flow rates of about 40,300 pounds (18,300 kilograms) per hour at the Permian site, 111,000 pounds (50,400 kilograms) per hour in total for the Turkmenistan sources, and 18,700 pounds (8,500 kilograms) per hour at the Iran site.

The Turkmenistan sources together have a similar flow rate to the 2015 Aliso Canyon gas leak, which exceeded 110,000 pounds (50,000 kilograms) per hour at times. The Los Angeles-area disaster was among the largest methane releases in U.S. history.

With wide, repeated coverage from its vantage point on the space station, EMIT will potentially find hundreds of super-emitters – some of them previously spotted through air-, space-, or ground-based measurement, and others that were unknown.

“As it continues to survey the planet, EMIT will observe places in which no one thought to look for greenhouse-gas emitters before, and it will find plumes that no one expects,” said Robert Green, EMIT’s principal investigator at JPL.

EMIT is the first of a new class of spaceborne imaging spectrometers to study Earth. One example is Carbon Plume Mapper (CPM), an instrument in development at JPL that’s designed to detect methane and carbon dioxide. JPL is working with a nonprofit, Carbon Mapper, along with other partners, to launch two satellites equipped with CPM in late 2023.

EMIT media reel

EMIT fact sheet

More About the Mission

EMIT was selected from the Earth Venture Instrument-4 solicitation under the Earth Science Division of NASA Science Mission Directorate and was developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California. It launched aboard a SpaceX Dragon resupply spacecraft from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 14, 2022. The instrument’s data will be delivered to the NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) for use by other researchers and the public.

The International Space Station hosts seven instruments for NASA Earth Science that are providing novel information for understanding our changing planet.

To learn more about the mission, visit:

https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/

News Media Contacts

Andrew Wang / Jane J. Lee

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307

[email protected] / [email protected]