Gizmorama - September 30, 2013

Good Morning,

According to researchers global warming could impact weather and could possibly cause more severe thunderstorms, which could mean billions of dollars in damages. All I heard was a lot of coulds, right? We will see. Until then make sure your insurance is paid up.

Learn about this and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Thousands of volunteers compile data on 300,000 galaxies --*
MINNEAPOLIS - Thousands of volunteers helped catalog more than 300,000 galaxies, the first time so much galaxy population information was collected, a U.S. researcher said. While computers are good for automatically measuring properties such as size and color of galaxies, the human eye is better for tackling the more challenging characteristics, such as shape and structure, the University of Minnesota said Tuesday in a release. Enter "Galaxy Zoo 2" project, the second phase of a crowdsourcing effort to help categorize the galaxies in the universe, the Minneapolis university said. "This catalog is the first time we've been able to gather this much information about a population of galaxies," said Kyle Willet, one of the researchers. "People all over the world are beginning to examine the data to gain a more detailed understanding of galaxy types." From February 2009 to April 2010, more than 83,000 Galaxy Zoo 2 volunteers worldwide looked at images online gathered from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The participants answered questions about the galaxy, including whether it had spirals, the number of spiral arms present, or if it had galactic bars, which are long extended features representing a concentration of stars. Each image was classified an average of 40 to 45 times to ensure accuracy, the researchers said. Researchers estimate the volunteers' effort represents about 30 years of full-time work if it were done by one researcher, and represents a boon to scientists gathering more information than ever using telescopes. "With today's high-powered telescopes, we are gathering so many new images that astronomers just can't keep up with detailed classifications," said Lucy Fortson, another researcher and a professor of physics and astronomy at the U of M. "We could never have produced a data catalog like this without crowdsourcing help from the public."


*-- Research indicates global warming could affect severe weather --*
STANFORD, Calif. - Global warming may impact weather, possibly causing more severe thunderstorms, which could mean billions of dollars in damages, a U.S. researcher said. To examine how global warming could impact atmospheric conditions, researchers led by Stanford University's Noah Diffenbaugh used a complex array of physics-based climate models. Last year, 11 weather disasters in the United State topped the billion-dollar threshold in economic losses, Science World Report reported Tuesday. The researchers identified two main ingredients to generate a thunderstorm. First, the atmosphere must contain a significant amount of what scientists call convective available potential energy, or CAPE, created as the air in the low atmosphere warms. Second, CAPE must interact with strong vertical wind shear, basically a moving wind current that organizes atmospheric energy and moisture so a storm can be sustained. The new model indicates an overall decrease in the amount of wind shear, yet most of that decrease occurs on days producing levels of CAPE much lower than normally seen during severe storms, researchers said. The net effect is that the increases in CAPE on other days pushes increases in the occurrence of severe thunderstorm environments. Researchers found the biggest changes with global warming occurred during spring, Science World Report said. At that time, the United States would experience about 2 1/2 additional storm days by the late 21st century, the modeling indicated. "We're seeing that global warming produces more days with high CAPE and sufficient shear to form severe thunderstorms," said Diffenbaugh, with Stanford's School of Earth Sciences. The researchers also discovered that sustained warming likely would cause strong increases in storm days over a large portion of the eastern United States in fall and winter as well. The summer season showed increases over the region as a whole. "The severe thunderstorms we experience now can result in very high economic losses," said Diffenbaugh. "Sadly, we have many examples of cases where a single storm has had disastrous impact. So a 25- to 30 percent increase in the annual occurrence represents a substantial increase in the overall risk."

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