planetwater

Neataroma.com has a post on “5 really weird things about water”. These 5 points are:

1. Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold Water
2. Supercooling and “Instant” Ice
3. Glassy Water
4. Quantum Properties of Water
5. Does Water Have Memory? Bonus: Ice Spikes Bonus 2: Make Instant Snow with Boiling Water

Item 5 does a fairly good job in explaining how Homeopathy is supposedly working!

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!

Homepage

Homepage

Homepage

San Francisco

Homepage

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!

International conference on geostatistics, in Santiago, Chile. Jing and I are going to present. Geostats2008

International conference on geostatistics in Southampton, UK. Thomas Pfaff and me are going to present. http://www.geoenv2008.org/

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.