News Archive
October/November 1999

Earth Today is a new exhibition located in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Thanks to earth-orbiting satellites and global monitoring networks which are continuously collecting images of and data on our planet's atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and biosphere, visitors can view temperature, cloud cover, and other conditions in near real time.

Project NOPP Drifters
Partnering Ocean Science, Education, and Technology
The National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) uses drifting buoys to track ocean currents. The Project NOPP Drifters Website, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, contains near real time flow data updates, deployment logs, data products from the Drifting Buoy Data Assembly Center, and ocean images. Data products include trajectories and analyses of drifting buoys, drifter maps and reports, annual mean velocity estimates, and drifting buoy databases. A Year of the Ocean (YOTO) Drifter Tracking Chart is also available for download. While this remains a useful site for ocean researchers, an educational activities section provides classroom tools as well.

Scientists have known for years that cloud formation is an extremely dirty business that depends on microscopic particles from the surface of the Earth. You can find out what scientists have discovered about clouds and the effect of fossil fuel burning on cloud formation in Every Cloud Has a Filthy Lining now available in the Study at NASA's Earth Observatory.

CDIAC adds database of woody vegetation responses to elevated CO₂
The U.S. Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), in collaboration with Ohio State University, has published a numeric data package called A Database of Woody Vegetation Responses to Elevated Atmospheric CO₂ (ORNL/CDIAC-120, NDP-072), a multiparameter database of research results from CO₂ enrichment studies covering 64 species and 35 response parameters.

Final A-110 Revision on Access to Research Data
The American Institute of Physics recently published FYI #146 which describes the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Final Revision of Circular A-110. This final revision reflects changes in response to public comments and goes into effect November 8, 1999. Notably, OMB states that "in light of [this] traditional scientific process, we have not construed the statute as requiring scientists to make research data publicly available while the research is still ongoing."

The September/October issue of Acclimations, the bi-monthly newsletter of the National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, includes a number of articles on international efforts to assess climate change impacts. In the lead article, Policy Implications of Scientific Assessment, Daniel Reifsnyder (U.S. Department of State) discusses the importance of the U.S. National Assessment and his experiences in international negotiations. Dan Albritton of the NOAA Aeronomy Laboratory talks about Ozone Assessment, Roger Street (Atmospheric Environment Service, Canada) describes the Canada Country Study, and the preparation of the IPCC Third Assessment Report is discussed by Kasey Shewey White. Additional articles cover activities in the United Kingdom and Mexico.

Cold Regions Bibliography
A joint endeavor of the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress and the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), this project disseminates information on Antarctica and cold regions science and technology "by maintaining and continually updating a database which is an accumulation of over 40 years of materials on the science and technology of the world's cold regions." This database currently contains over 208,000 records, with about 6,000 accessions annually.

Conference Announcement/Call for Papers
Data for Science and Society
In conjunction with several federal science agencies, the U.S. National Committee for CODATA is organizing the second national data conference (March 13-14, 2000) to address important multidisciplinary issues in managing and using scientific and technical (S&T) data, and to improve the visibility of those issues nationally. The main focus will be to promote the availability and usefulness of S&T data to all users, both in research and in the broader society, using examples of ground-breaking and innovative applications and highly creative partnerships.

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