Monday, April 17, 2006

CloudSat launch Friday Friday is the launch day for CloudSat, according to the Longmont Daily Times-Call. From the article, "For millennia, people have tried to learn more about the weather by looking up to the clouds. Early Friday, scientists from northern Colorado will try a different approach: looking down at them. That day, the satellites CloudSat and CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations) will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The satellites, working in a 'constellation' of satellites, will provide an extremely accurate picture of clouds around the globe. Despite their influence on the environment, clouds are poorly understood, Colorado State University professor Graeme Stephens said. Stephens is the primary investigator for CloudSat, a satellite that will, for the first time, analyze vertical slices of clouds as it orbits the globe. CALIPSO will measure aerosols in clouds. Stephens said clouds play a critical role in global climate change... "CloudSat's radar is more than 1,000 times more sensitive than existing equipment. It will be able to tell how much of a cloud is ice or water, how dense the cloud is and, in conjunction with other satellites, the level of aerosols within a cloud. CloudSat will orbit in a formation with several Earth-observing satellites, called the A-Train, that will work together to provide the most precise picture of cloud data to date. The satellite will beam high-intensity radar toward Earth's surface. It could tell the difference between raindrops and snowflakes and determine the thickness of condensation within clouds, said Ken Eis, deputy director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University. Stephens said CloudSat is not intended for weather prediction. It will give the scientific community a unique view of dangerous storms, he said, but the satellite is not intended to predict them." Category: Colorado Water 6:26:31 AM     Cloud-seeding Here's a short article about a proposed cloud-seeding effort amongst the Colorado Basin States from today's Rocky Mountain News. They write, "Colorado is at the center of an ambitious, multistate cloud-seeding plan that could boost mountain snowpack and potentially make available billions of gallons of new water. The cost of the plan isn't clear, and the whole idea isn't without critics. But the proposal has broad support among water managers of seven drought-plagued Western states that rely on the Colorado River... [Michael] Cohen and others say money would be better spent paying farmers in California and Arizona not to farm in dry years, when cities need the water, or in financing more water-conservation programs, such as paying people to remove bluegrass lawns, as Las Vegas does. Water managers admit that definitive research proving the effectiveness of cloud seeding is years away. But they point to several anecdotal studies, including one by Denver Water, that indicate an increase of about 10 percent in snowpack in areas where clouds had been seeded... "Key recommendations in the states' proposal include: Starting a three-year feasibility study to determine timing, costs and water-development potential of a multistate cloud-seeding effort; Launching a coordinated national research effort into cloud seeding led either by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation or the National Oceanographic and Atmospherics Administration; Expanding existing cloud-seeding programs. "Any programs in Colorado would be subject to existing guidelines, including stopping cloud seeding if snowpacks rise to the point that flooding becomes a concern. The proposal may signal a new era of cooperation among the Western states, which have spent much of the past 100 years fighting one another over the river's increasingly stretched supplies. This month, for example, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas anted up $45,000 to keep a cloud-seeding effort going in southwestern Colorado - an act of generosity rarely seen in the war zones along the river's banks. The lingering drought dropped lakes Powell and Mead to alarming new lows, and many believe the river has entered an era of shortage that will make it difficult to keep those two giant water banks full." Category: Colorado Water 6:12:09 AM

© Copyright 2006 John Orr. Last update: 12/29/06; 11:29:18 AM.