Monthly Archives: September 2009

September 5, 2009 | 6:39 AM | By

Seeding Clouds for Hydropower

PG&E cloud seeders located near Burney Falls, CA. Photo: PG&E

PG&E cloud seeders located near Burney Falls, CA. Photo: PG&E

Christina Aanestad’s radio feature for Climate Watch airs Monday morning on The California Report.

Wringing Hydropower Out of the Clouds

By Christina Aanestad

When cloud seeding began in the 1950’s there were no laws governing weather modification. According to Maurice Roos, Chief Hydrologist with the state Department of Water Resources (DWR), it wasn’t until the late 1970’s when a storm in a seeded area near Los Angeles flooded, that regulations governing weather modification were included in the state’s water code. In the West, “Most of the states have legislation that governs the conduct of weather modification activity,” says Brant Foote, director of the Research Applications Lab at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

Government oversight has changed over the years. Today in California, state regulations have slackened. “As for the State’s role, it is mainly informational. There are no permits or licenses,” said Roos. According to Roos, all cloud-seeding projects required permits until the law was reformed. “The old law required licenses and permits but it was repealed in the 1980’s. There was a general move toward deregulation in the government–mainly to reduce costs.” Today, according to Roos, Sponsors of cloud-seeding projects must notify DWR and county governments of the project, “This can be a letter or, for DWR, an e-mail notice,” he said. “They also have to publish a Notice of Intention in the county or counties affected by their proposed operations.”

Most of what this reporter learned was from Roos’ institutional memory, and going directly to sponsors of cloud-seeding operations–about 15 intermittent projects around the state. Data on cloud seeding at the state level is scattered, according to Roos. “We used to have an annual report that was published. Last time I tried to find it, it was in an archived box and nobody knew where it was,” said Roos, who added that budget cuts and deregulation mostly gutted the oversight program.

Despite lax oversight, the State of California wants to use weather modification as part of its 2009 Water Plan, which states:

“Cloud seeding has advantages over many other strategies for providing water. A project can be developed and implemented relatively quickly…it could offset some of the loss in snow pack expected from global warming.”

According to the plan, some regulation remains: weather modification sponsors need to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act [CEQA]. But not all seeding has to comply with environmental regulations. PG&E contends that an environmental impact report is not required for its Pit-McCloud River project because it is privately funded, with equipment on private lands,” said Roos.

That has locals groups near Mount Shasta concerned with PG&E’s proposed project in the Pit and McCloud River watersheds. “It’s a clear unequal treatment between public agencies and private entities,” said Angelina Cook with the Climate Council and the Mount Shasta Community Rights Project. “Private corporations require more government oversight and regulation to ensure accountability for the their practices.” But compiling all cloud-seeding data in California into one reference source today would be “a labor of love,” says Roos. “There’s no funds for it,” he said.

Cook says she is working on a cloud-seeding ban in Mount Shasta City, which may include a chemical trespass for silver iodide, the common chemical used in cloud seeding. “If silver iodide is found in the area, PG&E would be liable,” said Cook.
But Roos, who says cloud seeding is mostly benign, asks where one would draw the line. “There’s all kinds of influences on the air like people driving their cars, diesel trucks running around,” said Roos. Just as California has increased its regulations on air emissions in the state, some like Cook would like to see tougher regulations for weather modification as well.

Meanwhile, the state’s 2009 water plan also urges more research and development into cloud-seeding. Research could include cloud seeding’s impact on global climate change, and it’s effectiveness. The plan also identifies areas that could provide optimal results from cloud seeding, mostly in Northern California, along the Sacramento, Trinity and Russian Rivers.

Cloud Seeding Projects in California

View Cloud Seeding Projects in California in a larger map

To find references to cloud-seeding in the state’s water plan, look under Volume 3, then for “Precipitation Enhancement.”

FILED UNDER: Water, Alpine, clouds, Health, Technology, Water
September 4, 2009 | 11:05 AM | By

Atomic Timeline

atomic-symbol_blog

The blog post for today’s broadcast of my nuclear power segment on The California Report weekly magazine has been updated from the original post on August 24.

And don’t forget to check out  Amanda Dyer’s interactive  “Atomic Timeline,” with key milestones in the history of nuclear power development.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Power, Economics, Emissions, International, Nuclear, Policy, Technology, timeline
September 3, 2009 | 6:18 PM | By

Where There’s Smoke—And Where Isn’t There?

Earlier this week I got an email from a colleague in Boulder, Colorado, remarking on the crimson sunsets and brown haze that had settled across the Front Range, apparently caused by drifting smoke from California’s wildfires. At that point the Station Fire complex in Los Angeles County had already charred nearly 150,000 acres.

Smoke fans out from L.A. fires this week. Image: NASA

Smoke fans out from L.A. fires this week. Clickable image: NASA

My colleague Dan Brekke, an ardent watcher of elemental stuff like water and fire, featured a map of the spreading haze in his personal blog.

By Wednesday evening Brekke relayed that flames had consumed an area about the size of Chicago (and no, he couldn’t resist the low-hanging Mrs. O’Leary reference). With less than 30% containment, smoke had spread over about three-quarters of the state. Beyond California, NOAA had tracked the plumes “northward and eastward…across southern Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Kansas.”

Front page of Wednesday's Denver Post

Front page of Wednesday's Denver Post

From The Denver Post:

“Joe Ramey, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction, said that a high-pressure system is continuing to pump smoke from several California fires and 17 fires currently burning in Utah into the state. He said a fire near Nucla in south-central Colorado also may be contributing to the haze…Most of the smoke, however, is being generated by the 190-square-mile fire burning near Los Angeles, he said.”

While the current pall is not entirely California-born, it does make the point that large wildfires cast a surprisingly long shadow.

Atmospheric scientists classify smoke as an “aerosol” (any airborne particulate matter), which has a complicated set of feedbacks on the climate. For instance, aerosols encourage cloud formation and clouds have both positive and negative feedback effects on global warming. But it’s clear that smoke plumes generate greenhouse gases and also carry toxic air pollutants such as carbon monoxide.

Briefing journalists last month at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)–in Boulder, no less–atmospheric chemist Gabriele Pfister said that wildfires have multiple effects on the atmosphere. They “disturb the carbon cycle,” interfering with energy exchanges and generating greenhouse gases. Itinerant smoke can generate ozone pollution far from the initial fires. This presents a challenge for local regulation of “ground-level” ozone, since it’s often likely an import from distant fires.

FILED UNDER: The Science, aerosols, Emissions, fire, smoke, Wildfire
September 1, 2009 | 4:43 PM | By

Major Shifts in California Bird Movements

Stellar's Jay, Photo: National Park Service

Stellar's Jay. Photo: National Park Service

Climate change has California’s birds on the move, but not in the usual direction or at the same pace, a new study has found.  Research suggests that warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will cause bird species distributions to shift independently, resulting in new bird “communities” appearing in up to half the state.

In some cases, these new communities will create combinations of birds that have never existed before, a situation that could disrupt the delicate balance of species interactions with potentially unanticipated consequences for whole ecosystems, the report authors concluded.

One of the co-authors, Stanford biologist Terry Root, told Climate Watch: “This will not be just a few species in a few locations–this tearing apart of communities could be quite extensive across California.”

Root was among  researchers from Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, PRBO Conservation Science, the University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Klamath Bird Observatory, who collaborated on the study.  They used bird survey data and climate model projections for California to map current and future bird distributions for 70 species.  Many species often found together, such as acorn woodpeckers and western bluebirds, are projected to shift and adapt in different ways, resulting in these new assemblages.

PBRO has posted interactive maps of the future projections for individual species distributions on its Climate Change, Birds, and Conservation website, in the section called “Where will the birds be?“.

The study authors, including Terry Root of Stanford and Diana Stralberg and John Wiens of PRBO, write that the emergence of new bird communities in the coming decades present enormous conservation and management challenges.  They assert that rapidly changing habitats and ecological communities are going to require new approaches to conservation and management. “As new combinations of species interact, some species will face new competition and/or predation pressures, while others may be released from previous biotic interactions,” they wrote. “Managers and conservationists will be faced with difficult choices about how, where, and on which species to prioritize their efforts and investments.”

Root pointed to experience with wolves, coyotes and foxes, in which wildlife managers tried to control one,  only to see unexpected spikes in the population of another: “Here is a community of only 3 canines to which we purposely forced changes, and we had two big surprises.  Now we are talking about 70 species of birds shifting without any control of the force or the species being changed.  I guarantee there will be a lot of surprises.”

FILED UNDER: The Science, Birds, Conservation, Ecosystems, migration, Wildlife
September 1, 2009 | 1:38 PM | By

Trash Day in Tokyo: The Learning Curve

KQED’s Los Angeles Bureau Chief and frequent Climate Watch contributor Rob Schmitz is spending six weeks in Japan, as part of  the Abe Fellowship for Journalists. In the weeks to come he’ll file a series of special reports on Japan’s extraordinary strides in energy efficiency–and what we might learn from them.

Today was combustible garbage day in my neighborhood. On Tuesdays and Fridays, residents place all their garbage deemed ‘burnable’ out on the curb. At promptly 8 a.m., it is taken away and, presumably, burned.

Burn after reading? Recycling instructions in Japan.

Burn after reading? Trash day instructions in Japan.

I had a lot of questions about what was considered combustible and the sign on the light post advertising the pick-up days wasn’t very helpful. My wife and I brought our 11-month-old son here. Were diapers considered ‘burnable’? I knocked on the Webers’ door to ask. Terry and Sherry Weber live next door. They’ve been working as teachers in Tokyo for 27 years. They told me that up until recently, plastic products were not considered burnable items, but all of that changed this year, and now it’s apparently fine to deposit plastic items like diapers on the curb on combustible garbage day. Either way, they told me, if the sanitation officials see that I’ve tried to sneak in some non-combustibles on the incorrect day, they’d leave it on the curb with a note, scolding me for screwing it all up.

I put a bag of diapers and another bag of what I thought were burnable items on the curb, nervous that I’d be the laughing stock of my new neighborhood. An hour later, the garbage truck arrived, two men got out, inspected my garbage, and dumped all of it into the back of their truck.

The dreaded Tokyo city sanitation department gives me a passing grade on my burnable/non-burnable garbage sorting skills.

The dreaded Tokyo city sanitation department gives me a passing grade on my burnable/non-burnable garbage sorting skills.

Whew. Now I’ve got to prepare for Thursday, which is recyclables day. I’m supposed to separate all of my recyclables into paper, cardboard, plastic, and cans, and bundle each of them with string. Wish me luck.

Elsewhere on the waste disposal front:

I usually don’t get excited about toilets. But the toilet in my apartment here in Tokyo has inspired me to great heights.

It doesn't look exciting. But look more closely...

It doesn't look exciting. But look more closely...

The toilet gives the user two types of flushes: the ‘big’ flush, or the ‘small’ flush, so that you can control how much water you’ll need, thereby conserving this precious resource.

Please start importing these for your customers!

Parched water districts of California: Please start importing these for your customers!

But that’s not what got me excited. What I was really impressed by was when you flush the toilet, water is pumped into the tank at the back of the toilet via a faucet. It runs into a basin on top of the tank where you can wash your hands with the water before it enters the toilet for the next flush. Genius. Pure genius. Why don’t we see more of these in California, where water is an even more precious resource than it is here?

Editor’s Note: Dual-flush toilets are now available in California. But the piggy-back sink–that’s a new one for me. –CM

FILED UNDER: Water, International, Japan, recycling, Technology, trash, waste, Water