Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
You've all heard the amazing stories of soldiers hacking on the battlefield — the stories of fox hole radios, scrap armor, and anti-IED tech (that must constantly change as IED tech itself adjusts to the hacks). In time for this year's Memorial Day, the Army announced that they are going to start giving awards to recognize soldiers for their "Battlefield Innovations." Jeez, what took them so long? They're calling it the Soldier Greatest Inventions Awards.
I love the amazing stories of some of these battlefield innovations, some done at the risk of a soldier (or POW's) life. There are all of the pee hacks, for instance — peeing on machine gun barrels in WWI to cool them down, peeing on stuck gun mechanisms in WWII to unfreeze them from the winter cold, and the most amazing one, of Jewish prison workers secretly peeing on V2 control mechanisms to create time-released rusting which would remain undetected during assembly, but cause a malfunction by the time the rocket hit the pad. Recently, there's been the cat and mouse "game" between US forces and insurgents with tricks like suspending a toaster from a pole in front of a truck to cause heat-triggered IEDs to detonate early.
What are some of the more clever battlefield innovations that you've heard about?
On this Memorial Day, we offer you a few tools to help honor those who gave it all.
As we've done the last few years, we encourage you to check out Sean Askay's Map the Fallen project. Using his KML file
, you can learn about many of the people that have lost their lives in recent US military duty.
Another neat item to check out today is the US Medal of Honor collection that we first showed you in 2008. It was created by user 'Up_The_Spurs' from the Google Earth Community. You can download the KMZ and view the birthplaces, rank, organization, location of deed and citation for each winner.
If you know of any other great Memorial Day resources for Google Earth, please leave a comment and let us know.
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
We've covered a lot of games that have been created using Google Earth (and/or the Google Earth Plug-in) as the playing field. We wrote up an overview of many of them last year, and since then we've seen a few other great ones like "Drive the A-Team Van" and "Ships 1.5". However, I don't think I've yet seen a game that makes such extensive use of Google Ocean as I've seen with Sony's new Project Shiphunt.
The game is very well done and certainly quite challenging. You can play it at discover.sonystyle.com/shiphunt or watch the trailer below for more.
Have you tried it yet? Any luck finding some ships?
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
With erupting Icelandic volcanoes seemingly becoming an annual event, Adam Burt has overhauled his ash-cloud visualization tool for Google Earth, which he first made for Eyjafjallajökull's eruption in June of 2010. Based on data gleaned every six hours from the UK Met office, the resulting network link visualizes ash density from Grimsvötn at different times and airspace heights, and can be played as an animation. Here it is — open in Google Earth.
Interesting to see how at different heights, the ash heads off in completely different directions.
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
From Google Earth
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleEarthBlog/~3/Na9q36_crZ8/pix4d_can_automatically_turn_your_2.html
From Google Earth
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleEarthBlog/~3/YwBqmrLnMo8/lidar_views_of_the_carolina_bays.html
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Good luck and fair winds to the scientists and crew of the Bold.
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
http://www.udel.edu/researchmagazine/issue/vol2_no2_security/aquabots.html
The simplest definition of salinity is how salty the ocean is. Easy enough, right? Why is this basic property of the ocean so important to oceanographers? Well, along with the temperature of the water, the salinity determines how dense it is. The density of the water factors into how it circulates and mixes…or doesn't mix. Mixing distributes nutrients allowing phytoplankton (and the rest of the food web) to thrive. Mixing also distributes heat between the poles of the earth's poles and the equator which can affect climate. Climate change is important to oceanographers; therefore, salinity is important to oceanographers.
Spring Salinity Climatology for the Chesapeake
Salinity doesn't vary that much in the open ocean, but it has a wide range in the coastal ocean since the coast is where fresh water from rivers and salt water in the ocean mix. Our measurements of salinity along the coast provide us with a picture of how this complex mixing between fresh and salt water occurs and also affects the local biology, physics, and chemistry of the seawater. Our picture, however, is very small. Salinity data is collected by instruments on ships, moorings, and more recently underwater vehicles such as gliders. While these measurements are trusted to be very accurate, their spatial and temporal resolution leaves much to be desired when compared to say near-daily sea surface temperature estimated from a satellite in space.
Why can't we do the same thing we do with salinity then? Let's just measure salinity from a satellite and get the big picture. Well, it's not as simple, but it is possible. NASA's Aquarius mission http://aquarius.nasa.gov/ scheduled to launch this year is taking advantage of a set of three advanced radiometers that are sensitive to salinity (1.413 GHz; L-band) and a scatterometer that corrects for the ocean's surface roughness. With this they plan on measuring global salinity with a relative accuracy of 0.2 psu and a resolution of 150 km. This will provide a tremendous amount of insight on global ocean circulation, the water cycle, and climate change. Awesome, global salinity problem solved. What about coastal salinity? What if I wanted to know the salinity in the Chesapeake Bay? That's much smaller than 150 km wide.
That's where my project comes in. It involves NASA's MODIS-Aqua satellite (conveniently already in orbit: http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/), ocean color, and a basic understanding of the hydrography of the coastal Mid-Atlantic Ocean. Here's how it works. We already know a few things about the color of the ocean, that is, the sunlight reflecting back from the ocean measured by the MODIS-Aqua satellite. We know enough that we can estimate the concentration of the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll-a. So not only can we see temperature from space, but we can estimate phytoplankton biomass too! Anyway, there are other things in the water that absorb light besides phytoplankton and alter the colors we measure from the satellite.
Spring Salinity Climatology for the Mid-Atlantic
We group these other things into a category we call colored dissolved organic material or CDOM. CDOM is non-living detritus in the water that either washes off from land or is generated biologically. It absorbs light in the ultraviolet and blue wavelengths, so it's noticeable from satellites. In coastal areas especially, its main source of production is runoff from land. So, CDOM originates from land and we can see a signal of it from satellites that measure color. What's that have to do with salinity?
You may have already guessed it, but water from land is fresh. So, water in the coastal ocean that is high in CDOM should be fresher than surrounding low CDOM water. That's our basic understanding of the hydrography of the coastal Mid-Atlantic Ocean, how it relates to ocean color, and why we need the MODIS-Aqua satellite to measure it. With this information, I compiled a lot of historic salinity data from ships (over 2 million data points) in the Mid-Atlantic coastal region (Chesapeake, Delaware, and Hudson estuaries) and matched it with historic satellite data from the MODIS-Aqua satellite. Now I have a dataset that contains ocean color and salinity. Using a non-linear fitting technique, I produced an algorithm that can predict what the salinity of the water should be given a certain spectral reflectance. I made a few of these algorithms in the Mid-Atlantic, one specifically for the Chesapeake Bay. It has an error of ±1.72 psu and a resolution of 1 km. Not too bad, but there's always room for improvement. Even so, this is an important first step for coastal remote sensing of salinity. An algorithm like this can be used to get salinity data as often as sea surface temperature. That's pretty useful. Now we just need to apply it and make it better.
Climatologies of salinity can be downloaded here: http://modata.ceoe.udel.edu/dev/egeiger/salinity_climatologies/
http://www.oceanbytes.org/2011/05/11/conch-reef-survey-for-nasas-neemo-15-project/
Dr. Art Trembanis
CSHEL
109 Penny Hall
Department of Geological Sciences
The College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment
University of Delaware
Newark DE 19716
http://cshel.geology.udel.edu
302-831-2498
"Education is not the filling of a pot, but the lighting of a fire." -W. B. Yeats
For eight days, David Malki's Wondermark webcomic was turned into the Tinker's Handbook, a loving send-up of MAKE and maker culture. He ended the "handbook" with this wonderful Maker's Bill of Rights-like "codified set of the builder's, crafter's, maker's rules. [via Boing Boing, by way of MAKE's Laura Cochrane]
