Green House And Its Importance To Plants

Is a green house necessary to plants? Yes. Is a green house a requirement when growing floras? Yes but not essentially a requirement because you can still grow plants even without it. However, if you want to successfully grow healthy and robust plants, then cultivating them on the right location is essential. That is where building and providing floras with a rock-steady green house becomes necessary.

What are the benefits of a green house to plants?

It is beneficial to floras because foremost, it protects plants from bad weather condition. So with it, plants will definitely be protected from too much exposure to heat or sunlight and will be fully protected from a low temperature or a cold climate as well. If floras you breed are receiving just the correct amount of light sun and enclosed within a thermostatically-controlled type of environment, there is no question that plants would grow in fine form. Surely, that is what you want to happen for your lovely plants.

The second reason why a green house is vitally important to plants is that through it, you can water plants controllably. In other words, you give plants the correct measurement of water, neither too much nor too little. That would not only make the condition of floras in healthy form but as well, that is how you can be prolific on growing plants.

Finally, growing floras on one location offers you a huge advantage because if you want to take care of plants every now and then, you only need to visit one area and that is in the green house. You can not enjoy such benefit should you do not have it at home while growing plants. That is the good thing of a green house.

Upon discovering that it gives you lots of advantages when gardening, it is beyond doubt that creating first a worth of reliance green house prior to horticulture is a recommendation that you should take seriously.

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Source: http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Green-House-And-Its-Importance-To-Plants/4237125

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Care urged over technical redundancy | Stuff.co.nz

What does the term technical redundancy really mean and are the obligations arising in a technical redundancy any different from a conventional redundancy?

Technical redundancy refers to circumstances in which an employer will no longer be able to offer employment because of developments, such as the sale of the business.

Upon the settlement of a sale, the business is handed over to the purchaser and at that point the vendor/employer no longer has work to offer to the existing work force.

Those are the circumstances in which the employees are described as being "technically" redundant.

There are a number of well-established obligations on an employer contemplating any form of redundancy. These include consultation with potentially affected staff ahead of any decisions actually being made. That obligation is reinforced by the statutory obligations in section 4 of the Employment Relations Act 2000 which require both parties to an employment relationship to be responsive and communicative with each other.

In particular, an employer proposing to make a decision likely to have an adverse effect on the continuation of employment (such as a sale of the business) is obliged to give the employees access to information relevant to the continuation of their jobs and an opportunity to comment on the information before any decision is made. This obligation can create some difficulties for an employer/vendor contemplating sale of the business. First, the employer may not want to unsettle the work force by discussing a possible sale in case nothing actually eventuates. Most employers in those situations tend to think a discussion with the work force will only be necessary once a sale is actually negotiated and confirmed. Further, many purchasers in the negotiation of a prospective business purchase insist on negotiations remaining confidential. What then is the answer to the tension between commercial expectations and the communication obligations described?

A recent decision of the Employment Relations Authority clearly confirms the obligations on an employer when a technical redundancy arises are no different from those in any other circumstances. The authority determined that a business called JMV Agri Ltd unjustifiably dismissed an employee when negotiating the sale of the business and did not consult with him until advising that the business had been sold.

The authority accepted the sale was genuine and accordingly that the employee's redundancy was genuine.

However, the failure to observe procedural requirements rendered the dismissal unjustified.

There may well be some difficulties in balancing the obligations owed as an employer with the desire to achieve commercially realistic outcomes. Getting that balance wrong will have significant financial consequences.

Simon Menzies is a partner at Harkness Henry, Lawyers, Hamilton.

- ? Fairfax NZ News

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Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/small-business/7876385/Care-urged-over-technical-redundancy

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Uncertainty of future South Pacific Island rainfall explained

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2012) ? With greenhouse warming, rainfall in the South Pacific islands will depend on two competing effects -- an increase due to overall warming and a decrease due to changes in atmospheric water transport -- according to a study by an international team of scientists around Matthew Widlansky and Axel Timmermann at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa. In the South Pacific, the study shows, these two effects sometimes cancel each other out, resulting in highly uncertain rainfall projections.

Results of the study are published in the 28 October online issue of Nature Climate Change.

The largest rainband in the Southern Hemisphere -- the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ) -- is the main source of rainfall for South Pacific island nations. Changes in this rainfall band would have severe consequences for the vulnerable island nations already having to adapt to accelerating sea level rise. Yet, very little is known about how this 8,000-km-long climate feature will respond to greenhouse warming.

"One reason why the SPCZ projections are so elusive is that many climate models are notoriously poor in simulating this important rainband, even under present-day climate conditions," says Postdoctoral Fellow Widlansky at the International Pacific Research Center. "We were able to overcome some model shortcomings in simulating South Pacific climate by removing model deviations from observed sea surface temperatures."

With the resulting improvements in climate model performance, Widlansky, Timmermann, and colleagues could identify two competing mechanisms affecting rainfall trends in the South Pacific.

"We have known for some time that rising tropical temperatures will lead to more water vapor in the atmosphere," explains Timmermann, professor of oceanography at the International Pacific Research Center and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "Abundant moisture tends to bring about heavier rainfall in regions of converging winds such as the SPCZ." Scientists refer to this as the "wet gets wetter" climate change mechanism.

"Nearly all climate change model simulations, however, suggest the equatorial Pacific will warm faster than the SPCZ region. This uneven warming is likely to pull the rainband away from its normal position, causing drying in the Southwest Pacific and more equatorial rainfall," Timmerman goes on to say. The study refers to this as the "warmest gets wetter" mechanism.

Widlansky adds, "When we evaluated the latest climate change experiments being conducted by international climate modeling groups, we saw that these competing mechanisms are the cause for uncertainty in the SPCZ rainfall projections."

The scientists found that depending upon the degree of tropical warming expected this century, one or the other mechanism is more likely to win out. With moderate warming, weaker sea surface temperature gradients are likely to shift the rainband towards the equator, potentially causing drying during summer for most Southwest Pacific island nations. For much higher warming possible by the end of this century, the net effect of the opposing mechanisms is likely a shift towards more rainfall for the South Pacific islands.

"To be more definite in our projections, however, we need more extensive observations in the South Pacific of how clouds and rainfall form and how they respond to such climate phenomena as El Ni?o. Before we have more confidence in our calculations of the delicate balance between the two climate change mechanisms, we need to be able to simulate cloud formations more realistically," says Timmermann.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Hawaii ? SOEST, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Matthew J. Widlansky, Axel Timmermann, Karl Stein, Shayne McGregor, Niklas Schneider, Matthew H. England, Matthieu Lengaigne, Wenju Cai. Changes in South Pacific rainfall bands in a warming climate. Nature Climate Change, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1726

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/WZSnmbHnABc/121028142308.htm

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Chinese officials bow to protests against factory

NINGBO, China (AP) ? Thousands of protesters who marched through an eastern Chinese city on Sunday against the expansion of a petrochemical factory won a pledge from the local government that the project would be halted.

The protest, which comes at a sensitive time in China's political calendar, had swelled over the weekend and led to clashes between citizens and police. The Ningbo city government said in a statement Sunday evening that they and the project's investor had "resolutely" agreed not to go ahead with the expansion. The factory is a subsidiary of Sinopec, one of the biggest petrochemical companies in the world.

Outside the government offices where crowds of protesters remained, an official tried to read the statement on a loudspeaker but was drowned out by shouts demanding the mayor step down. On the third attempt, the crowd briefly cheered but then turned back to demanding that authorities release protesters being held inside.

Liu Li, 24, a Ningbo resident, said the crowd did not believe the government's statement.

"There is very little public confidence in the government," she said. "Who knows if they are saying this just to make us leave and then keep on doing the project."

The city government was likely under great pressure to defuse the protest with China's leadership wanting calm for a party congress next month at which the country's new leaders will be named. It was unclear whether local authorities will ultimately cancel the project or continue it when the pressure is lower.

Hundreds of people outside the government offices refused to budge despite being urged to leave by officials. Riot police with helmets and shields then came out of the government compound and pushed the crowd back. Some people including families ran away. Police dragged six men and one woman into the compound, beating and kicking at least three of them. Police also smashed placards and took away flags.

The crowd roared for the protesters' release. Police also briefly detained ITN correspondent Angus Walker outside the offices.

The demonstration in wealthy Zhejiang province is the latest this year over fears of health risks from industrial projects, as Chinese who have seen their living standards improve become more outspoken against environmentally risky projects in their areas.

"The government hides information from the people. They are only interested in scoring political points and making money," said one protester, Luo Luan. "They don't care about destroying the environment or damaging people's lives."

The protests began a few days earlier in the coastal district of Zhenhai, where the petrochemical factory is located. On Saturday they swelled and spread to the center of Ningbo city, whose officials oversee Zhenhai.

Residents reported that Saturday's protests involved thousands of people and turned violent after authorities used tear gas and arrested participants.

Authorities said "a few" people disrupted public order by staging sit-ins, unfurling banners, distributing fliers and obstructing roads.

Early Sunday, thousands of residents began gathering outside the offices of the municipal government. Hundreds marched away from the offices in an apparent effort to round up more support along nearby shopping streets. Police diverted traffic to allow them to pass down a main road.

The crowds in Ningbo are a slice of China's rising middle class that poses an increasingly boisterous challenge to the country's incoming leadership: Armed with expensive smartphones, Internet connectivity and higher expectations than the generations before them, their impatience with the government's customary lack of response is palpable in every fist pump and every rendition of the national anthem they shout.

A 30-year-old woman surnamed Wang said officers took her to a police station Saturday and made her sign a guarantee that she would not participate in any more protests, but she came back Sunday anyway.

"They won't even let us sing the national anthem," Wang said. "They kept asking me who the leader of the protests was and I said that this is all voluntary. We have no leader."

In a sign that censors were at work, the name "Zhenhai" ? the city district where the factory is located ? was blocked on China's popular microblogging site Sina Weibo, and searches for "chemical expansion project" were greeted with the line that "Some search results are not shown according to regulations."

Protester Yu Yibing said he wanted the factory to be closed and his 7-year-old son to grow up in a clean environment.

"As the common people, we need to live in a green environment. This is a reasonable request," Yu said. "But the government only puts out some statement and refuses to see us and also suppresses us. I don't know how else we can express our views."

The Zhenhai district government, which comes under the Ningbo government, said Ningbo's Communist Party chief, Wang Huizhong, and mayor, Liu Qi, had held discussions with local residents Saturday night.

It said in a short statement on its website Sunday evening that the project wouldn't go ahead and that refining at the factory would stop for the time being while a scientific review is conducted.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the planned project was designed to produce 15 million tons of refined oil and 1.2 million tons of ethylene per year and belongs to Sinopec Zhenhai Refining & Chemical Co., which has invested 55.87 billion yuan ($8.9 billion).

Calls to Zhenhai police and the propaganda department of Ningbo police rang unanswered Sunday.

Past environmental protests have targeted a waste-water pipeline in eastern China and a copper plant in west-central China. A week ago, hundreds protested for several days in a small town on China's Hainan island over a coal-fired power plant.

___

Associated Press writer Louise Watt and researcher Henry Hou in Beijing contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-officials-bow-protests-against-factory-122959453.html

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Forecasters: Sandy 'one for record books'

?

Hurricane Sandy is forecasted to hit the East Coast, but as NBC's Al Roker explains, the storm may also pack a punch for many inland areas.

By NBC News staff

As Hurricane Sandy barrels toward the East Coast, forecasters?warn it?s threatening to be one of the worst storms to hit the Northeast in decades.

The storm?already killed more than 40 people in the Caribbean. Officials all along the Eastern Seaboard have declared states of emergency and meteorologists have warned residents ? both coastal and inland ? to prepare for gale-force winds, chances of flooding, heavy rain, power outages and even snow.

Here?s a look at what some weather forecasters?predict.

Al Roker, chief meteorologist for NBC's TODAY Show

?Sandy is now back up to hurricane strengths with winds now up to 75 miles per hour. As we?ve seen already, it has caused massive destruction in its path. This one looks like it?s going to be one for the record books. It?s threatening to be one of the worst storms to hit the Northeast in decades. States of emergency have already been declared across five states and D.C., and in Norfolk, Va., the Navy is sending their ships out to sea as a precautionary measure.?

Helpful hurricane gadgets and apps

The Weather Channel

Carl Parker, hurricane specialist on?The Weather Channel

"We?re really concerned about the?water level rise. Because of the size of the system has everything to do with that potential for water-level rise. When you think about (Hurricane) Charlie, for example, it was a very powerful storm; it was a very small storm, so it wasn?t blowing water over a very large section of ocean. But this storm is going to be blowing water over a huge area ? hundreds of miles ? and that?s why it?s going to really pile up the water, and why the surge could be devastating?when it finally comes on shore."

?You can see the storm moving further southward more toward south Jersey so in this case again we are piling up the water as early as late tomorrow, coming up here toward the coast of New Jersey, and towards Long Island and then as the storm moves into New Jersey we see that maximum water level rise occurring just north of the area of low pressure, and that could have serious, potentially huge impact in New York City, in particular, because of the surge potential there, so that would maximize the surge around Long Island and then down and across the Jersey Shore.?

Get the latest on the storm from BreakingNews.com

?

Don Morelli, meteorologist with WSI, a sister company of The Weather Channel

"They?ve had quite a bit of time to prepare for this, that?s the good side of this, they have been able to trim some branches from over wires and maybe try to minimize the power outages. But still, we are talking about a wind shield with severity of several hundred miles, so we are looking for widespread power outages in?the New England area from southern Maine to central Connecticut and from areas in interior New York to the mid-Atlantic region."

Serious Sandy targets East Coast

"After the fact with all this rain and blustery wind after the main storm center comes in on Monday, Tuesday the root system of these trees are very, very loose so it won?t take much to knock off trees even after the storm makes inland so this isn?t just for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, for the mid-Atlantic region, could even go in to mid-week, and then we are talking you know maybe a week or two of power outages for wide spread areas."

"The criteria for closing an airport is around 58, 60 miles an hour, which is easily going to be reach for much of the major hubs from D.C.? Northward to New York city and even into Logan [in Boston]." "Major delays going to be very, very widespread right through mid-week, so [it?s]not a good week to be traveling? across the Northeastern U.S."

Hurricane Tracker: Follow storm's path

?

Bill Karins, NBC Meteorologist?

"The greatest destruction is expected to occur Monday afternoon and evening as Sandy makes landfall near the New Jersey shore.?Serious and life threatening weather conditions are expected from Outer Banks to New England. The landfall window is from Long Island to Ocean City, Md., but the Jersey Shore covers 80 percent of that area so I'm expecting a New Jersey landfall. Areas of Northern Jersey, coastal New York City, Long Island and Connecticut are facing a major coastal flood threat from a possible top 5 all-time recorded storm surges."

"Lastly we are certain to be dealing with destructive weather conditions Monday and?Tuesday but Wednesday will be no walk in the park with the storm stalling near Philadelphia and then slowly drifting into New England during Halloween. This will keep periods of rain and gusty southerly winds (20-40 mph) over the hardest hit areas of New Jersey, New York City, Long Island and coastal Connecticut. All hands on deck power restoration efforts will likely not begin until Thursday."

"People in the high impact zone from Virginia to Southern New England have one day left to make preparations and plans before Sandy significantly impacts their lives. After the storm hits expect the cleanup and power outage restoration to continue right up through Election Day."

Sandy may deliver an October surprise for presidential campaign

Jose Luis Magana / AP

After strong winds and heavy rain washed out bridges and damaged homes in multiple countries, the hurricane looks toward the northeastern U.S.

?

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Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/27/14745413-forecasters-on-hurricane-sandy-one-for-the-record-books?lite

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Ukraine votes with opposition leader in jail

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) ? Ukrainians are electing a parliament on Sunday in a crucial vote tainted by the jailing of top opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko and fears of election fraud.

With the charismatic former premier serving a seven-year sentence on abuse of office charges and the opposition split into two parties, President Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions is expected to retain its parliamentary majority.

The West is paying close attention to the conduct of the vote in the strategic ex-Soviet state, which lies between Russia and the expanding European Union and is responsible for transporting energy supplies to many EU countries.

A strong showing by the Party of Regions will cement Yanukovych's grip on power and likely turn Ukraine further away from the West. Ukraine's relations with the U.S. and the European Union have soured over the jailing of Tymoshenko, pushing Brussels to shelve a long-awaited partnership deal with Kiev. If the West turns a cold shoulder on Ukraine, Moscow is likely to court Kiev to create a greater economic and political alliance.

The pro-Western opposition groups hope to gain enough parliament seats to challenge Yanukovych's power and undo what they call his undemocratic and harmful policies, such as the jailing of Tymoshenko and her top allies, the concentration of power in the hands of the president, the upgrading of the status of the Russian language, which some believe poses a threat to the Ukrainian tongue, waning press freedoms, a deteriorating business climate and growing corruption.

Dmitry Kovalenko, a 50-year-old entrepreneur in Kiev said he voted for Tymoshenko's Fatherland party in hopes of ending Yanukovych's monopoly on power.

"I am against repression," Kovalenko said after casting his ballot in a polling station in central Kiev. "It's easy to win when your opponents are in jail."

But the opposition has been weakened with Tymoshenko, the 51-year-old heroine of the 2004 Orange Revolution that had ousted Yanukovych from power, in jail. Tymoshenko's Fatherland party is running neck-to-neck with another pro-Western group, the Udar (Punch) party led by world boxing champion Vitali Klitschko.

Klitschko's party has gained popularity in recent months, capitalizing on voter disappointment with both Yanukovych and Tymoshenko's years in power, which were marked by a slow pace of reforms and constant bickering in the Orange camp.

"We've tasted both the orange and the blue and life hasn't changed for the better," said Zhanna Holovko, a 43-year-old high school teacher in Keiv referring to the campaign colors of the Orange revolution team and Yanukovych's party. "I am voting for a third force that I can trust," Holovko said after voting for Klitschko's group.

The opposition's failure to form a strong alliance has played into the hands of Yanukovych.

And while Tymoshenko's and Klitschko's parties are expected to make a strong showing in elections by party lists, half of the 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada will be allocated to the winners of individual races where the Party of Regions are stronger. Yanukovych has centered his party's campaign on bringing stability after years of infighting in the Orange camp and relative economic recovery after the global financial crisis, which hit Ukraine severely.

"Stability, stability, stability is what Ukraine needs," said Olexiy Nalivaichenko, 35, a civil servant in Kiev, who voted for Yanukovych's party. "We want to feel confident and secure about tomorrow."

Also expected to get into parliament is the Communist party, which is expected to side with Yanukovych's lawmakers. Another party that could pass the 5 percent threshold is the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom), a staunch government critic infamous for xenophobic and anti-Semitic statements.

Besides Tymoshenko's jailing, which already raises big questions about the fairness of the vote, preliminary reports by international observers have identified numerous other problems during the election campaign. They include the use of state funds, bureaucracy and facilities by the ruling party in support of their candidates, media coverage on television tilted toward the Party of Regions, reports of intimidation of opposition candidates and the opposition's fears of ballot stuffing and other vote fraud.

_____

Yuras Karmanau contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-votes-opposition-leader-jail-071821772--finance.html

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Could e-voting machines in Election 2012 be hacked? Yes.

Security experts say a specific kind of electronic-voting machine is vulnerable to being hacked. Influencing a national election would be difficult, but the advance of malware makes it possible.

By Mark Clayton,?Staff writer / October 26, 2012

Voters cast ballots on touch-screen voting machines during in-person absentee voting at the Fairfax County Governmental Center in Fairfax, Va., in early October.

Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS/File

Enlarge

Rapid advances in the development of cyberweapons and malicious software mean that electronic-voting machines used in the 2012 election could be hacked, potentially tipping the presidential election or a number of other races.

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Since the machines are not connected to the Internet, any hack would not be a matter of someone sneaking through cyberspace to change ballots. Rather, the concern is that an individual hacker, a partisan group, or even a nation state could infect voting machines by gaining physical access to them or by targeting the companies that service them.

The 2010 discovery of the Stuxnet cyberweapon, which used a thumb drive to attack Iran's nuclear facilities and spread among its computers, illustrated how one type of attack could work. Most at risk are paperless e-voting machines, which don?t print out any record of votes, meaning the electronically stored results could be altered without anyone knowing they had been changed.

In a tight election, the result could be the difference between winning and losing. A Monitor analysis shows that four swing states ? Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, and Florida ? rely to varying degrees on paperless machines.

"The risk of cyber manipulation of these machines is quite real," says Barbara Simons, a computer researcher and author of "Broken Ballots," a book documenting e-voting vulnerabilities. "Most people don't understand that these computer-based voting machines can have software bugs or even election-rigging malicious software in them."

There are plenty of software vulnerabilities to exploit, says Matt Blaze, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 2007, he was on a team investigating touch-screen and other voting systems for California and Ohio. The resulting study concluded? "virtually every important software security mechanism is vulnerable."

The paperless machines, however, stand out as particularly vulnerable.

"If there's no paper trail, you can have the corrupted software display on the voting-machine screen whatever you want to display ? and then after the voter leaves, record something completely different inside," says Richard Kemmerer, a computer scientist who heads the University of California, Santa Barbara, Computer Security Group.

Voting for Pac-Man

For example, Alex Halderman, a researcher at the University of Michigan, and a colleague at Princeton University hacked into a paperless touch-screen voting machine in 2010 and installed the video game Pac-Man. That lab exercise took three afternoons but did not break any tamper-proof seals and left no traces.

Similarly, he and Princeton researchers in 2006 demonstrated that if someone could get a few minutes? unattended access to a paperless machine, that person could install a software virus that could spread to other machines and switch those machines? votes before deleting all traces of itself.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/_--24hn8h40/Could-e-voting-machines-in-Election-2012-be-hacked-Yes

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NASA radar penetrates thick, thin of Gulf oil spill

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2012) ? Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have developed a method to use a specialized NASA 3-D imaging radar to characterize the oil in oil spills, such as the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The research can be used to improve response operations during future marine oil spills.

Caltech graduate student Brent Minchew and JPL researchers Cathleen Jones and Ben Holt analyzed NASA radar imagery collected over the main slick of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill on June 22 and June 23, 2010. The data were acquired by the JPL-developed Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) during the first of its three deployments over the spill area between June 2010 and July 2012. The UAVSAR was carried in a pod mounted beneath a NASA C-20A piloted aircraft, a version of the Gulfstream III business jet, based at NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif. The researchers demonstrated, for the first time, that a radar system like UAVSAR can be used to characterize the oil within a slick, distinguishing very thin films like oil sheen from more damaging thick oil emulsions.

"Our research demonstrates the tremendous potential of UAVSAR to automate the classification of oil in a slick and mitigate the effects of future oil spill tragedies," said Jones. "Such information can help spill incidence response commanders direct cleanup operations, such as the mechanical recovery of oil, to the areas of thick oil that would have the most damaging environmental impacts."

Current visual oil classification techniques are qualitative, and depend upon the skill of the people doing the assessment and the availability of skilled observers during an emergency. Remote sensing allows larger areas to be covered in a consistent manner in a shorter amount of time. Radar can be used at night or in other low-light or poor weather conditions when visual surveys can't be conducted.

Radar had previously been used to detect the extent of oil slicks, but not to characterize the oil within them. It had generally been assumed that radar had little to no use for this purpose. The team demonstrated that UAVSAR could be used to identify areas where thick oil had mixed with the surface seawater to form emulsions, which are mixtures of oil and seawater.

Identifying the type of oil in a spill is vital for assessing its potential harm and targeting response efforts. For example, thin oil consists of sheens that measure from less than 0.0002 inches (0.005 millimeters) to about 0.002 inches (0.05 millimeters) thick. Sheens generally form when little oil is released, as in the initial stages of a spill, or from lightweight, volatile components of spill material. Because sheens contain little oil volume, they weather and evaporate quickly, and are of minor concern from an environmental standpoint. Oil emulsions, on the other hand, are 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) thick, contain more oil, and persist on the ocean surface for much longer, thereby potentially having a greater environmental impact in the open sea and along the shoreline.

"Knowing the type of oil tells us a lot about the thickness of the oil in that area," said Jones.

The researchers acquired data in June 2010 along more than 3,400 miles (5,500 kilometers) of flight lines over an area of more than 46,330 square miles (120,000 square kilometers), primarily along the Gulf Coast. They found that at the time the slick was imaged by UAVSAR, much of the surface layer of the Deepwater Horizon spill's main slick consisted of thick oil emulsions.

UAVSAR characterizes an oil spill by detecting variations in the roughness of its surface and, for thick slicks, changes in the electrical conductivity of its surface layer. Just as an airport runway looks smooth compared to surrounding fields, UAVSAR "sees" an oil spill at sea as a smoother (radar-dark) area against the rougher (radar-bright) ocean surface because most of the radar energy that hits the smoother surface is deflected away from the radar antenna. UAVSAR's high sensitivity and other capabilities enabled the team to separate thick and thin oil for the first time using a radar system.

"We knew we were going to detect the extent of the spill," said Holt. "But we had this great new instrument, so we wanted to see how it would work in this extreme situation, and it turned out to be really unique and valuable, beyond all previous radar results for spills."

"We studied an unprecedented event using data collected by a sophisticated instrument and were able to show that there was a lot more information contained in the data than was apparent when we began," said Minchew. "This is a good example of how the tools of science could be used to help mitigate disasters in real time."

UAVSAR is returning to the Gulf of Mexico area this month and will image the area around the Deepwater Horizon site to look for leaks. In the future, UAVSAR data may be combined with imaging spectroscopic data from JPL's Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) instrument to further improve the ability to characterize oil spills under a broader range of environmental conditions.

In addition to characterizing the oil slick, UAVSAR imaged most of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico coastline, extending from the Florida Keys to Corpus Christi, Texas, with extensive inland coverage of the southern Louisiana wetlands around Barataria Bay, the terrestrial ecosystem that ultimately sustained the greatest oiling from the massive spill. Researchers tracked the movement of the oil into coastal waterways and marshlands, monitored impact and recovery of oil-affected wetlands, and assessed how UAVSAR can support emergency responders in future disasters.

UAVSAR is also used to detect detailed Earth movements related to earthquakes, volcanoes and glaciers, as well as for soil moisture and forestry biomass studies. For more on UAVSAR, see: http://uavsar.jpl.nasa.gov/mission_flights.html .

Results of this study are published this month in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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Journal Reference:

  1. Brent Minchew, Cathleen E. Jones, Benjamin Holt. Polarimetric Analysis of Backscatter From the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Using L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2012; 50 (10): 3812 DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2012.2185804

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/8yTeoUwhAeY/121026101246.htm

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