planetwater

Air temperatures in Germany vary with a weekly cycle: wednesdays are the warmest days, saturdays the coldest. These results were produced by Bernhard Vogel and Dominique Bäumer at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, as is reported by Die Tageszeitung. They point out that this is not a local phenomenon, since they found the same phenomenon at fairly remote stations, in the German Alps for example. Additionally they argue that such a strict weekly phenomenon could not originate in nature, and they blame little particles in the air (aerosols) that are emitted mostly during work-days from factories and traffic. Similar results were subsequently found in China and in the USA.

Rain on Saturday

Die Tageszeitung proceeds to describe how this is not unanimously accepted in the scientific community. Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen from the ETH Zürich. He compared Swiss data from Zürich and Lugano with the German data used by Vogel and Bäumer, trying to figure out if precipitation and temperature behaved similarly in Switzerland as in Germany as reported by Vogel and Bäumer. Lugano is south of the Alps and hence should be influenced from different weather mechanismns than Germany. Additionally, Lugano is located in the vicinity of Milano, which exhibits Smog frequently.

Both Lugano and Zurich never showed a persistent weekly cycle for precipitation and sunshine duration for the investigated period. In addition, only 4 of the calculated 28 anomalies for the period 1991 – 2005 (2 stations x 2 variables x 7 weekdays) were statistically significant (statistically 1.4 anomalies are expected). Only one of the four statistically significant anomalies had the same sign as observed by BV07. The anomalies were analyzed further in a Monte Carlo study. The stochastic simulation experiments suggest that none of the anomalies was significant; even the largest anomaly (the anomaly of Saturday precipitation in Zurich of 18.0%) occurred in 9% of the experiments due to purely random effects. In addition, for 21% of the stochastic experiments a weekly cycle in precipitation in Zurich is found due to random effects.

Vogel and Bäumer respond on Hendrick’s finding in a comment published also in the Geophysical Research Letters. Die Tageszeitung points out that there are additional studies being conducted in Spain and in the USA, all to evaluate the role that aerosols in the air play related to weather. It’s great to see that sometimes research is well published in newspapers for the public!

I just finished installing a new calendar feature on planetwater, which was is being developed by WPCAL. This calendar will show you upcoming events that are related to the world of planetwater. On the sidebar, there is a new calendar. It’s called “Planetwater Events”. Below, in the section “Event Listing” you can see a list of the five next events. In the calendar, days with an event are marked red. You can hover your mouse over it, then you will see a short description of the event, or you can click on a red number representing a day, then you will see a more detailed description of the event. You can subscribe to the calendar in iCal (MacOS) or thunderbird by clicking on the rss symbol at the top of the calendar or by using this URL.

If you want me to add certain events, please let me know!

Fudging the Event Listing required some CSS, and I have no idea about CSS. So I googled and came up with this “solution”, however, I’m sure it’s damn ugly (especially the border part). I’d appreciate if somebody could point me to a better solution.

[code lang=”CSS”]

.ec3_list { display: inline; border: 5px solid white; }

.ec3_list li a { display: inline; }

[/code]

By the way, thanks folks over at wordpress-magazin.de for pointing that out as well as many other useful hints!

This week is World Water Week, an international conference held in Stockholm, Sweden. The motto for this year’s meeting is ”For a Clean and Healthy World” and the focus is on water, sanitation and development. The official website contains loads of interesting information.

Folks, I’ve recently tuned some internal settings of this blog — updated to a new version of the blogging engine (wordpress), looked into how this blog could be found more easily with major search engines, and I think this is working better now. Also I removed categories, and instead introduced and switched completely to tags. I think most of this tuning should be finished now, so I am confident there will be more posts coming up really soon. The recent stats look really promising! We’ve got some significant amount of readers now! Yay! One thing I want to work on is to get a more active readership! Why are you guys commenting so little? Come on now! 🙂

Seriously, do you have suggestions how to improve this?

I like it!

via veryspatial

A couple of weekends ago I went with my girlfriend on a long guided tour through a forrest. We spent a few hours wondering around and exploring what’s crawling and living there: little bugs that are quite strong, different growing stages of trees, fungi and other living beings on dead trees. It turned out that the guy who gave the tour was a beekeeper. He made some delicious honey, trying to put a bee colony or two in the center of an area where mostly a certain type of tree grows. Say a kind of wild cherry tree. Then he sold that essentially authentic honey to us for a few Euros per 500g glass.

Honey - a delicious natural product!

A few things came to my mind: a) real honey is delicious and b) I have noticed quite a few insects this year (it’s warm and relatively moist), but very few honey bees. The cherry tree in our garden had extremely many flowers, but only about a quarter of the flowers turned into actual cherries.

I talked to some people, and after I asked them they all agreed, that they have noticed very few bees around this year. I started to look a bit around and found this scary blog post from “bootstrap analysis”: There is a pesticide called clothianidine, which is sold by the brand “Poncho” by Bayer, that is linked to the deaths of honeybees in 11,500 colonies. In early June, Germany halted the sale of Poncho, but in July the ban was lifted. There are similar other pesticides still on sale and being used, in Germany and in other parts of the world.

This is not directly linked to water (yet). But who knows the pathways? I guess reading “Silent Spring” is not enough. But what can you do? Not buy the corn that was planted using Bayers chemicals?

Update 27. August 2008: bootstrap analysis published an update on related pesticide issues and how we don’t learn from history

Global food shortages have placed the Middle East and North Africa in a quandary, as they are forced to choose between growing more crops to feed an expanding population or preserving their already scant supply of water.

read more | digg story

The Story of Stuff

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Personally, I’ve always thought bottled water is weird. First, I don’t like it carbonated (bubbly), second, it seems weird to buy something, that is coming straight out of the taps in your house, with equal or even better quality control than what you would buy in bottles, and you don’t have to carry it.

Especially, I always thought this image to be scary:

Ok, it’s sugary water, not “pure” water, but hey.

The NY Times recently reviewed a book that looks into the phenomenon of bottled water: “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It” by Elizabeth Royte (at amazon.com or at VLB)

There is also a letter to the editor which provides some insights as to how drinking water is controlled in the US. And there is also a free chapter available to read online at the NYTimes.

I first read about EDI Exploration Drilling International GmbH when my girlfriend read the “VDI news” this weekend. I saw the picture of a nice drill rig, and instantaneously I was reminded about my drilling days, and hooked (great layout! :-)).

It seems like those EDI guys had a pretty smart idea: the “fluid finder”. On the picture this thing looks like a Waterloo Profiler, but bigger. They put it just above the bit when they drill mud rotary. It saves time when they want to pump water out of the hole: They don’t need to jack all the drill rods out of the hole, but can just drop a pump inside the drill rods, and use the “fluid finder” as a screen. According to the VDI-article, it seems like it’s mostly used for exploratory holes. I think it can save time and money, but I’m not sure how valuable it is for scientific / environmental projects. Although unfortunately, I’ve never seen it live.