[dmwg] PDC WORLD HAZARD BRIEFS - WEATHER-CLIMATE

[Nathan Sage]

Hi Gang,

Here is another of the PDC products available to the public.  Visit our
website to subscribe.

*USAToday<http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2010-07-19-vietnam-storms_N.htm>
*[July 19] *A tropical storm brewing in the South China Sea forced Vietnam
to suspend the search Monday for 17 fishermen missing from a storm that
struck over the weekend, disaster officials said.* Eleven fishermen from two
trawlers were reported missing from the earlier tropical storm, Conson,
which hit Saturday night, disaster official Do Son in central Quang Ngai
province said. Six fishermen from another boat were reported missing after
their vessel sank Friday while seeking shelter at the Paracel islands off
Vietnam's coast.

 Conson had earlier struck the Philippines at typhoon strength, leaving 68
people dead and another 84 remain missing. It was downgraded to a tropical
storm before it made landfall in Vietnam. More than 600 homes were damaged
and 43 boats destroyed in Vietnam, authorities said. Meteorologists said
Monday a tropical depression with sustained wind speeds of up to 38 mph has
now formed and could gather strength to become a tropical storm overnight.

 Disaster official Phan Van On from Quang Ngai province said the
search-and-rescue operations to locate the missing fishermen have been
suspended. In the northern province of Quang Ninh, authorities found a man
who was earlier reported missing after his small boat sank in the
picturesque tourist attraction of Ha Long Bay, said disaster official Pham
Dinh Hoa.

 Authorities also recovered the body of a 1-year-old who died of an illness
just before the storm hit. The body was swept away from the mother when the
small boat she was using to ferry the body for burial capsized, he said.

Authorities also found the body of a female Vietnamese tourist swept away by
big waves while swimming, said disaster official Nguyen Thi Bich Lien, in
northern Thanh Hoa province. The woman was not counted as a victim because
she drowned before the storm came.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Glenn James <gjames at pdc.org>
Date: Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 9:44 AM
Subject: PDC WORLD HAZARD BRIEFS - WEATHER-CLIMATE
To: Ed Teixeira <eteixeira at scd.hawaii.gov>
Cc: Ray Shirkhodai <rays at pdc.org>


 This product is a compilation of reporting from external news sources.
Please click on the citation for the full text of each article. This
product, and the articles presented herein, should be interpreted only as a
digest of current hazard-related news, and not as a representation of the
viewpoints of the Pacific Disaster Center <http://www.pdc.org/>







*ENN <http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/41549> *[July 19] *Soaring
temperatures across large swathes of Russia have destroyed nearly 10 million
hectares of crops and prompted a state of emergency to be declared in 17
regions. *On Friday the state-run Moscow region weather bureau said it
expected the heat wave, which has gripped the country since late June and is
estimated to have already cost the agricultural sector about $1 billion, to
continue into next week. Saturday could see temperatures in Moscow hit 37
Celsius (98.6 Fahrenheit), which would break the previous record of 36.6C.
set in 1936.**

"It looks like tomorrow could just break the record," the weather bureau's
Moscow head Yelena Timakina said. The high temperatures and tinder dry land
have exacerbated the problem of forest fires. Billowing smoke and orange
flames encircle Moscow as peat and forest fires resist attempts to
extinguish them.

 A state of emergency due to what the grain lobby says is the country's
worst drought in 130 years, has now been imposed in 17 Russian regions, up
from 16 earlier this week. The area affected sprawls from the southern Urals
and central European Russia to the Volga, the Agriculture Ministry said in a
statement on Friday. A state of emergency might be declared in a further two
regions. As of Thursday crops on a combined area of 9.6 million hectares
have been destroyed. This comprises some 12 percent of all lands sown to
crops in Russia, or a territory roughly the size of Hungary.

*USAToday<http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2010-07-19-vietnam-storms_N.htm>
*[July 19] *A tropical storm brewing in the South China Sea forced Vietnam
to suspend the search Monday for 17 fishermen missing from a storm that
struck over the weekend, disaster officials said.* Eleven fishermen from two
trawlers were reported missing from the earlier tropical storm, Conson,
which hit Saturday night, disaster official Do Son in central Quang Ngai
province said. Six fishermen from another boat were reported missing after
their vessel sank Friday while seeking shelter at the Paracel islands off
Vietnam's coast.

 Conson had earlier struck the Philippines at typhoon strength, leaving 68
people dead and another 84 remain missing. It was downgraded to a tropical
storm before it made landfall in Vietnam. More than 600 homes were damaged
and 43 boats destroyed in Vietnam, authorities said. Meteorologists said
Monday a tropical depression with sustained wind speeds of up to 38 mph has
now formed and could gather strength to become a tropical storm overnight.

 Disaster official Phan Van On from Quang Ngai province said the
search-and-rescue operations to locate the missing fishermen have been
suspended. In the northern province of Quang Ninh, authorities found a man
who was earlier reported missing after his small boat sank in the
picturesque tourist attraction of Ha Long Bay, said disaster official Pham
Dinh Hoa.

 Authorities also recovered the body of a 1-year-old who died of an illness
just before the storm hit. The body was swept away from the mother when the
small boat she was using to ferry the body for burial capsized, he said.

Authorities also found the body of a female Vietnamese tourist swept away by
big waves while swimming, said disaster official Nguyen Thi Bich Lien, in
northern Thanh Hoa province. The woman was not counted as a victim because
she drowned before the storm came.

*ScienceDaily<http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100616133327.htm>
** *[July 19] *The world is a cooler, wetter place because of flowering
plants, according to new climate simulation results published in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B.* The effect is especially pronounced in
the Amazon basin, where replacing flowering plants with non-flowering
varieties would result in an 80 percent decrease in the area covered by
ever-wet rainforest.

The simulations demonstrate the importance of flowering-plant physiology to
climate regulation in ever-wet rainforest, regions where the dry season is
short or non-existent, and where biodiversity is greatest.

"The vein density of leaves within the flowering plants is much, much higher
than all other plants," said the study's lead author, C. Kevin Boyce,
Associate Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.
"That actually matters physiologically for both taking in carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere for photosynthesis and also the loss of water, which is
transpiration. The two necessarily go together. You can't take in
CO2without losing water."

This higher vein density in the leaves means that flowering plants are
highly efficient at transpiring water from the soil back into the sky, where
it can return to Earth as rain.

"That whole recycling process is dependent upon transpiration, and
transpiration would have been much, much lower in the absence of flowering
plants," Boyce said. "We can know that because no leaves throughout the
fossil record approach the vein densities seen in flowering plant leaves."

For most of biological history there were no flowering plants -- known
scientifically as angiosperms. They evolved about 120 million years ago,
during the Cretaceous Period, and took another 20 million years to become
prevalent. Flowering species were latecomers to the world of vascular
plants, a group that includes ferns, club mosses and confers. But
angiosperms now enjoy a position of world domination among plants.

"They're basically everywhere and everything, unless you're talking about
high altitudes and very high latitudes," Boyce said.

Dinosaurs walked the Earth when flowering plants evolved, and various
studies have attempted to link the dinosaurs' extinction or at least their
evolutionary paths to flowering plant evolution. "Those efforts are always
very fuzzy, and none have gained much traction," Boyce said.

Boyce and Lee are, nevertheless, working toward simulating the climatic
impact of flowering plant evolution in the prehistoric world. But simulating
the Cretaceous Earth would be a complex undertaking because the planet was
warmer, the continents sat in different alignments and carbon- dioxide
concentrations were different.

"The world now is really very different from the world 120 million years
ago," Boyce said.

*Building the Supercomputer Simulation*

So as a first step, Boyce and co-author with Jung-Eun Lee, Postdoctoral
Scholar in Geophysical Sciences at UChicago, examined the role of flowering
plants in the modern world. Lee, an atmospheric scientist, adapted the
National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate Model for the
study.

Driven by more than one million lines of code, the simulations computed air
motion over the entire globe at a resolution of 300 square kilometers
(approximately 116 square miles). Lee ran the simulations on a supercomputer
at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley,
Calif.

"The motion of air is dependent on temperature distribution, and the
temperature distribution is dependent on how heat is distributed," Lee said.
"Evapo-transpiration is very important to solve this equation. That's why we
have plants in the model."

The simulations showed the importance of flowering plants to water
recycling. Rain falls, plants drink it up and pass most of it out of their
leaves and back into the sky.

In the simulations, replacing flowering plants with non-flowering plants in
eastern North America reduced rainfall by up to 40 percent. The same
replacement in the Amazon basin delayed onset of the monsoon from Oct. 26 to
Jan. 10.

"Rainforest deforestation has long been shown to have a somewhat similar
effect," Boyce said. Transpiration drops along with loss of rainforest, "and
you actually lose rainfall because of it."

Studies in recent decades have suggested a link between the diversity of
organisms of all types, flowering plants included, to the abundance or
rainfall and the vastness of tropical forests. Flowering plants, it seems,
foster and perpetuate their own diversity, and simultaneously bolster the
diversity of animals and other plants generally. Indeed, multiple lineages
of plants and animals flourished shortly after flowering plants began
dominating tropical ecosystems.

The climate-altering physiology of flowering plants might partly explain
this phenomenon, Boyce said. "There would have been rainforests before
flowering plants existed, but they would have been much smaller," he said.

*USAToday<http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wildfires/2010-07-19-washington-fire_N.htm>
*[July 19] *Calmer winds helped firefighters make progress Monday on a
wildfire that has burned about 15 square miles in central Washington
state.*The fire was about 15% contained, "and if the weather
cooperates they'll
have much more contained today," said Christy Boisselle, a spokeswoman for
West Valley Fire and Rescue. Easing winds allowed bulldozers to build lines
that pinched the fire into an area behind a gravel pit.

Monday's forecast high in the area is near 90 degrees, but winds of no more
than 6 mph were expected. On Sunday, stronger winds pushed the fire so fast
that it overran one of the department's fire trucks. Three firefighters
escaped with minor injuries such as sprains and singed hair.

The blaze started in grass and brush about 10 miles west of Yakima, sending
smoke over the city of 71,000 and the Yakima Valley, which is known for its
tree fruit, wine grapes and hops. The fire burned into several orchards,
which acted as a buffer, helping firefighters.

West Valley Fire and Rescue Chief Dave Leitch said about 100 firefighters
from across the state helped the roughly 200 mostly volunteer and local
firefighters who responded. The cause remained unknown. Leitch said the fire
started near a creek in farmland, not near a house or campground.







-- 
Nathan Sage  |  Southeast Asia Program Advisor  |  Hanoi Project Office  |
Pacific Disaster Center (PDC)  |  University of Hawaii
+84 90 345 7801  |  nsage at pdc.org  |  www.pdc.org
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