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global change news
Bush Administration Launches Historic Federal Climate Change Initiatives
Advances Understanding of Climate Variability, Potential Responses and Options
The Bush Administration recently announced unprecedented federal initiatives designed to organize the federal government's climate change science research system along with funding for global climate observation. The new, historic initiative brings together the resources and expertise of 13 federal agencies. The Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), a joint federal program of the President's Committee on Climate Change Science and Technology Integration, has issued its strategic plan to address some of the most complex questions and problems dealing with long-term global climate variability and change. It reflects an unprecedented outreach to interested parties, including some 1,200 scientists and stakeholders and representatives of over 35 countries. The document describes a strategy for developing knowledge of variability and change in climate and related environmental and human systems, and for encouraging the application of this knowledge.

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The Patagonia Icefields of Chile and Argentina, the largest non-Antarctic ice masses in the Southern Hemisphere, are thinning at an accelerating pace and now account for nearly 10 percent of global sea-level change from mountain glaciers, according to a new study by NASA and Chile's Centro de Estudios Cientificos. Researchers Dr. Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Andres Rivera of Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile; and Dr. Gino Casassa of Centro de Estudios Cientificos, Valdivia, Chile, compared conventional topographic data from the 1970s and 1990s with data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, flown in February 2000. Their objective was to measure changes over time in the volumes of the 63 largest glaciers in the region.

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global change research
NCAR Explores Link Between Climate Change and Air Quality
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and other institutions are launching a far-reaching project this month to help the government keep polluted areas in compliance with Clean Air Act standards in the event of rising global temperatures. The three-year project will focus on modeling air quality in the United States in the middle of the 21st century. The National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, and U.S. Forest Service are funding the project.

As the climate warms, the population increases, and forests and croplands are altered, scientists expect the potential for air pollution in coming decades will change in significant and sometimes subtle ways. Policymakers, already concerned about curbing industrial emissions, also must factor in the possibility of more wildfires and the differing impacts that tree plantations and natural forests have on the formation of pollution. "When conditions are changing, all your strategies have to be adjusted," explains NCAR scientist Alex Guenther, who is part of the research team. "For the government to make sure that air quality doesn't worsen, it needs to take into account changes in temperature and vegetation as well as industrial emissions."

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global change data
Estimates of CO₂ Emissions Released by Dept. of Energy's CDIAC
The U.S. Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) has released estimates of CO₂ emissions from fossil-fuel combustion and cement production, on global, regional, and national scales, for the years 1751-2000. The estimate for 2000 global CO₂ emissions, 6611 million metric tons of carbon, represents a 1.8% increase from 1999. These estimates, derived primarily from energy statistics published by the United Nations, were calculated using the methods of Marland and Rotty (1984). Cement production estimates from the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Mines were used to estimate CO₂ emitted during cement production. Emissions from gas flaring were derived primarily from U.N. data, and were supplemented with data from the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) and CDIAC.

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global change data
Landsat 7 Continues To Provide Earth Science Data
Landsat 7, one of the Nation's two earth remote sensing satellites, continues to provide useful images and data of the earth's surface despite a problem encountered with one part of the satellite. Attempts to fix the problem from earth have not been successful. "The problem involves a correction for the forward motion of the satellite," said R.J. Thompson, chief of the U.S. Geological Survey's EROS Data Center, from where the Landsat Program is managed. "But Landsat 7 continues to operate and send back degraded but still useful images and data that earth scientists use to track changes in the surface of our planet." Thompson said Landsat 7 is acquiring about 75 percent of the data of each image it was designed to provide. In the meantime, data from Landsat 5, launched in 1984, continues to send vital images of the U.S. and will continue to be used as a backup and to fill in gaps in coverage areas.

Landsat 5, launched in 1984, covers the entire earth's surface every 16 days and has continually served as a backup for the technologically advanced Landsat 7 since its 1999 launch. Landsat 5 has performed far beyond its three-year design lifetime, and sent hundreds of thousands of 100-mile by 100-mile land-surface images to U.S. and international ground receiving stations. The Landsat Program is the longest running program providing vital images of the Earth's surface from space. The first Landsat satellite was launched in 1972 and since then, Landsat satellites have been providing a constant stream of moderate-resolution images. In 1999, the Landsat Program took a giant leap forward technologically with the launch of Landsat 7. The instruments on the Landsat satellites have acquired more than 4 million images of the surface of the planet, providing a unique resource for scientists who study agriculture, geology, forestry, regional planning, education, mapping and global change research.

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global change research
Climate Change and U.S. Agriculture: Benefits Dwindle as the Picture Sharpens
Computer-based simulations of U.S. agriculture show that, by the year 2060, the benefits of climate change to American croplands could be less than previous work had indicated. A team of scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and several universities found that finer-scale simulations tend to reduce projected benefits and increase projected losses for a wide range of crops across most parts of the nation. The team's findings, which appear in the September issue of Climatic Change, are being reprinted this month by Kluwer Academic Publishers as a monograph entitled "Issues in the Impacts of Climate Variability and Change on Agriculture." NCAR scientist Linda Mearns is the editor and lead investigator.

The diverse study team included climatologists, geographers, economists, remote sensing specialists, and statisticians. Its work was supported by multiyear grants from NASA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Additional support came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and NCAR's primary sponsor, the National Science Foundation. Using a set of computer models that account for climatic, economic, and agricultural factors, the team compared present-day conditions to scenarios for a doubled level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which will occur around 2060 if present trends continue. They then compared the climate portrait of 2060 derived from an Australian global-scale climate model, in which the atmosphere is tracked at points separated by 300 kilometers (186 miles), to the results from a regional climate model nested inside the global model, with a resolution of 50 km (31 mi).

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