The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety tested two houses in 95-mph winds; the one on the right, which had only $3,000 worth of improvements, fared significantly better. (CREDIT: IBHS)

Two adjacent, brand-new houses – one was torn from its foundation by winds, the other stood strong. A mere $3,000 in building costs made the difference, including a simple wind-resistant measure: a front door that stays shut in a storm because it’s built to open outward rather than inward.

The 95-mile-per-hour winds that blasted the two homes were not in some recent hurricane, but in an experiment conducted in the world’s largest wind tunnel, Carl Hedde told an audience May 1 at the AGU Science Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. The test chamber is part of a $40-million research center the insurance industry has created in Chester County, South Carolina, to investigate ways of making structures less vulnerable to natural disasters.

“We’re taking steps to build better and safer structures,” said Hedde, senior vice president and head of risk accumulation for Munich Re in Princeton, N.J.

Munich Re is a reinsurance firm (i.e. a company that insures insurance companies) that was also one of the AGU science policy conference sponsors.  Hedde, who spoke in a session about decreasing the economic toll of disasters, also serves as chairman of the board of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, the non-profit organization created by insurance companies that funds the research center and other building-safety programs. The institute’s test chamber has also subjected full-scale buildings to dousing, and jets of burning embers (which simulate wildfires). Engineers are gearing up now to pummel buildings next year with artificially produced hail storms.

Such experiments are taking place against a backdrop of increasing damage and financial losses globally from earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, winter storms, hail, droughts, wildfires and other natural perils.

Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. , who also spoke in the session, noted that in 2011, the United States experienced a record-breaking number of extreme weather events that each caused damage of a billion dollars or more. And extremes are increasing across a variety of weather types, from tornadoes, to heavy rainstorms, to warmer minimum temperatures, Karl said, citing data from several analyses, some not yet published.

Another speaker, Frank Boteler, discussed changes expected in U.S. agriculture as climate patterns shift. Those include different types and locations of crops planted and rethinking irrigation strategies. Boteler is the assistant director of the Institute of Bioenergy, Climate, and Environment of the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture in Washington, D.C.

Daniel Aldrich learned about natural disasters up close and personal in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and a 15-feet-deep flood inundated his home on Canal Boulevard.

Aldrich, a social scientist currently on a fellowship at the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C., and also a speaker on the panel, has conducted research since then on the resiliency of communities struck by disasters. He has drawn upon nearly 7,000 interviews of New Orleans residents, mostly conducted by another scientist. He has also studied survivors of the 1923 and 1995 earthquakes in Japan and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in India. Aldrich found that stricken communities in which people are entwined socially bounce back more readily from disasters. “Individuals who are tightly bound together are more able to collectively organize,” he said. On the other hand, “individuals who are more atomized, less connected … tend to leave or to cause problems in the recovery.” Aldrich has written a book about his findings, which will come out in August.

Besides better anticipating extreme weather and building more weather-resistant structures, communities can improve how well they fare in such shocks by strengthening their social fabric.  “Our goal should be to build up social networks,” Aldrich urged.

-Peter Weiss, AGU Public Information manager

At a natural hazards session during AGU's Science Policy Conference, officials discussed the need for natural disaster preparedness, and early warning systems. (Credit: NOAA)

When it comes to natural hazards, early warnings and preparedness are key, federal and local government officials stressed at the American Geophysical Union’s inaugural Science Policy Conference in Washington, DC, Tuesday.

Marcia McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, spoke at a session on improving public safety. She told the scientists and policy makers in the audience about the agency’s latest efforts to quickly detect earthquakes – and even warn of their arrival. One program in the very early stages in California would alert communities and businesses in the southern part of the state seconds before the ground starts shaking from a quake centered in Northern California, she said. A USGS scientist is working on a way to use people’s home computers to detect shaking, creating a vast, makeshift collection of seismic sensors called the “Quake-Catcher Network.” In another effort, McNutt added, damage projections directly after a quake are modified based on the reports of people who log onto the agency’s “Did You Feel It?” website.

“We’re using social media, and calling upon people’s innate interest in natural events, to have people be a sensor network for us, for any kind of natural hazard,” McNutt said.

In Florida, where climate change is already proving hazardous for the highly populated peninsula, four counties have banded on planning how to fight it, said Kristin Jacobs, a county commissioner with Florida’s Broward County and another session speaker.

“We really are seeing first-hand what’s happening,” she said, showing pictures of a yard which flooded with saltwater that had backed up through the storm drains after a high tide. “It’s really scary.”

There’s not enough money to solve all the problems, Jacobs said, and so governments – like the Florida counties – need to work together to tackle the problems.

“Most people take the Scarlett O’Hara approach to life: ‘I’ll think about that tomorrow,’” Jacobs said. “But government’s responsibility is to plan and be ready. We should be the Boy and Girl Scouts.”

One challenge in disaster preparation, said Timothy Manning, FEMA’s Deputy Administrator for Protection and National Preparedness, is that although experts think they understand what is possible, records are often broken.

“Our written record in the U.S. only goes back about 100 years,” he said. “On a 4.5 billion-year-old planet, that’s not a very good sample size.”

Natural disasters, as well as those caused by engineering failures, continue to exceed officials’ expectations, he said. Recent advances in areas such as tornado warnings, hurricane tracking maps, and more are helping lessen harm done from those threats. Manning asked the scientists in the audience to keep investigating new and improved ways to warn of natural hazards.

“Good science leads to lives saved,” Manning said. “So the more work that we do in that regard, the better off we all are.”

-Kate Ramsayer, AGU science writer

The Arctic is feeling the effects of climate change - with one town seeing the coast crumble nearby (CREDIT: Buzz Hoffman, Flickr)

A few inches of seashore loss per year is usually cause for alarm among coastal communities. This is nothing to the Alaskan inhabitants of Newtok, who have experienced as much as 100 lateral feet of shoreline loss in the same amount of time.

Newtok is a small village about 490 miles west of Anchorage, Alaska, accessible only by air and water. Over the past 60 years, inhabitants of the village have seen nearly 3,800 lateral feet of their coastline disappear into the ocean, said Stanley Tom, a tribal administrator in the town, during a presentation at the American Geophysical Union’s inaugural Science Policy Conference on Tuesday. The land, normally frozen and resilient permafrost, is thawing and becoming increasingly susceptible to erosion.

It’s one result of a greening arctic, said Bruce Forbes, a researcher at the University of Lapland in Finland and another speaker at the conference session on changing arctic ecosystems. Increased temperatures in the Arctic have been a boon to native vegetation and allowed the plants to grow both taller and fuller, he explained, leading to a greener landscape.

When it comes to establishing policy to help cope with a warming arctic, Forbes said it’s important to interact with the local inhabitants like Tom. Locals often have their own set of long-term observations, he mentioned, that could and should be incorporated in any scientific studies of the area.

“If you don’t know what the people on the ground are doing and you don’t have [locals] involved in your research, you really don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

- Eric Villard, AGU science writing intern

When biomass burns, including during wildfires, it releases a pollutant that can cause health problems at high concentrations. (Credit: NOAA)

Author Katy Human is a science writer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo.

A smoke-related chemical may be a significant air pollutant in some parts of the world, especially in places where forest fires and other forms of biomass burning are common, according to new research.

In a modeling study, scientists found that relatively high levels of the chemical, called isocyanic acid, are likely occur in parts of tropical Africa, Southeast Asia, China, Siberia, and the Western Amazon Basin.

“This is the first study to model the global distribution of isocyanic acid, and the concentrations we estimated for many regions are high enough to warrant more research to understand people’s exposures,” said Paul Young, lead author of the paper published online Friday in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. Young is an atmospheric scientist with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Isocyanic acid is emitted by burning biomass, such as forest fires. People who cook or heat their homes using inefficient stoves could get significant exposure to the chemical. In the body, isocyanic acid can trigger certain kinds of protein damage which, in turn, leads to cataracts and inflammation associated with cardiovascular disease and rheumatoid arthritis, according to published health research.

NOAA scientists published a study last year that was one of the first to observe the acid in the air. Using a NOAA-built custom instrument, the researchers found the chemical downwind of a Colorado wildfire, in cigarette smoke, and in the air of downtown Los Angeles. In LA, the source of the chemical remains unknown, but possibilities include emission control devices, regional wildfires, and light-driven chemical reactions. That study also suggested that if the acid was present in the air at 1 part per billion by volume (ppbv) or higher, it could trigger chemical reactions associated with negative health effects; it was below that concentration in the California and Colorado air.

In the new study, Young and his colleagues investigated further, using a sophisticated computer model of the atmosphere to better understand the chemical’s distribution around the globe. Their model used the limited information available on isocyanic acid to include processes that remove the chemical from the atmosphere and to estimate its emissions.

The researchers found that annual average levels of isocyanic acid are likely highest in parts of China, where modeled concentrations reached 0.47 ppbv (about half of the 1 ppbv suspected to trigger health concerns). But at certain times, the pollutant spiked significantly higher in regions where episodic fires occurred: Isocyanic levels periodically reached 4 ppbv in parts of tropical Africa and the Western Amazon Basin, and up to 10 ppbv in Southeast Asia and Siberia.

In parts of Siberia and tropical Africa, modeled isocyanic acid levels surpassed 1 ppbv for more than 60 days out of the year, the team reported. In more populated areas, however, exposure is potentially more significant: For Southeast Asia, the scientists estimated that more than 50 million people could be exposed to levels of isocyanic acid above 1 ppbv for more than seven days in one year.

Isocyanic acid is difficult to detect in the atmosphere with conventional measurement techniques, and the emissions estimates in the new paper are likely significantly underestimated in some parts of the world (where inefficient stoves are common), and possibly overestimated in others (where fossil fuel burning for electricity is more common).

“Our estimates are preliminary,” said co-author Jim Roberts, a NOAA chemist. “But given the potentially high concentrations of isocyanic acid in those hotspots, and the numbers of people potentially affected, we hope that more atmospheric scientists and health researchers will be encouraged to look into this issue.”

-Katy Human, NOAA science writer (For NOAA’s version of this feature, visit http://researchmatters.noaa.gov/news/Pages/IsocyanicAcidStudy.aspx)

Space shuttle enthusiasts snap photos of Discovery on display outside the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum companion facility near Dulles Airport, on 19 April before the shuttle was moved into a hangar at the center. Photo by Mary Catherine Adams, AGU.

It’s quite a legacy: The most launches into space for any one vehicle (39 if you’re counting); a trip to low-Earth orbit while nestling the Hubble Space Telescope like a proud mother carrying her baby; launching on both “Return to Flight” missions after two comrades were lost – Challenger in1986 and Columbia in 2003; and returning John Glenn to orbit, 36 years after he became the first American to make that journey there.  No wonder Discovery – perhaps NASA’s most praise-worthy space shuttle orbiter – is being parked in the Smithsonian. (Never mind that its prototype, the Enterprise, is being quietly ushered away to make room.)

Discovery’s trip to its new home drew a fair bit of attention in the Washington, D.C., area. When the parking lot at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center – the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum companion facility near Dulles Airport that will serve as Discovery’s new home – filled on Tuesday ahead of the orbiter’s mid-morning flyover, drivers stopped along the sides of busy roads and stood in the grass for a peek, just as onlookers stood on the beaches of Florida to watch the first Space Shuttle launch three decades ago.

A temporary indoor display featuring NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, currently bound for Mars, and a scale model of the Orion vehicle (the shuttle’s successor), spoke to hopes for the future of space science exploration.

People crowd to take pictures of Space Shuttle Discovery as it is towed into the space hangar at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum companion facility near Dulles Airport on 19 April, 2012. Photo by Mary Catherine Adams, AGU.

Still, as we ogled the two shuttles parked nose-to-nose outside on the tarmac, there was an undercurrent of sadness at this very visible bookend of the space shuttle program.

The outdoor viewing areas also turned some people’s sadness into frustration. Unfortunately, what was billed online as an event for the public turned out to be a largely media-focused affair. The space exploration fans standing near me had to wait for a break in the bobbing heads of the media before snapping a picture of Glenn or one of the other 20-plus astronauts onstage a half a football field away.

As the day wound down, however, attitudes of admiration and awe persisted. Crowds that had spent the afternoon touching space shuttle tiles and learning paper airplane aerodynamics gathered outside once more to watch Discovery being towed into the hanger. Enthusiasts of all ages, many sporting a “Discovery World Tour” or “STS-135” t-shirt with the screen-printing already cracked and the dye already faded stood three deep against the barricades, and lowered their video cameras to clap and cheer as Discovery’s wings and tail slipped into the hangar.

A little boy, perhaps eight years old, threw rocks from a small collection he had amassed, watching as they broke into pieces on the ground: Red rocks and beige rocks and gray rocks, some with matching interiors, some without. The spirit of discovery, I was reminded, is still around. Which astronauts I wondered spent their childhoods smashing apart rocks?

-Mary Catherine Adams, AGU public information specialist

To see more photos from Discovery’s welcome ceremony at Udvar Hazy, click here to go to the AGU Facebook page.

Human population growth has contributed to a 6 percent global drop in surface water sources such as lakes, rivers and marshes. (Credit: Flickr user bcfoto70)

When populations expand, the demand for fresh water rises. And over the past two decades, population growth has contributed to a 6 percent decline in worldwide surface water, according to a new study.

Only about one-third of one percent of all the water on Earth is usable fresh surface water, which includes lakes, rivers, and wetlands. Growing populations use these surface water sources. People drain marshes for urban development and for agriculture to support the ever-increasing population, for example.

Subtropical and tropical equatorial areas like South America and South Asia – particularly China and India – contributed to more than half of the overall decrease in land surface water over the last two decades, said Catherine Prigent of the Observatoire de Paris, in France, and lead author of the study to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Taking water coverage data from multiple satellites, including several NOAA satellites, researchers noted the change in surface water over a 15-year period from 1993 to 2007.

Prigent and her fellow researchers found that important declines are often located in regions where the population increased significantly, likely due to the draining and destruction of wetlands for development and construction. Wetlands are known to filter hazardous chemicals and contain large of amounts of greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide, gasses which are released when the wetlands are drained.

Prigent mentioned there may be additional causes of the decline, but other potential causes she investigated – including precipitation, evaporation and temperature – did not show as strong a link as population density.

A lack of other studies analyzing the global change of surface water means that it is difficult to tell if this decline is normal or greater than usual, Prigent said. Nevertheless, the past two decades of data show the decline is there. Recognizing the drop is only part of the process, she said, noting that more environmentally sustainable land-use planning is necessary.

“It’s important to be aware that the decline is there,” Prigent said. “The problem is how do you avoid that decline?”

Prigent, C., Papa, F., Aires, F., Jiménez, C., Rossow, W., & Matthews, E. (2012). Changes in land surface water dynamics since the 1990s and relation to population pressure Geophysical Research Letters DOI: 10.1029/2012GL051276

-Eric Villard, AGU science writing intern

Recent research shows the ocean may contain more plastic debris than previously thought. Here, samples researchers pulled up from the Sargasso Sea. (Credit: Kukulka et al.)

The ocean is filled with more plastics than previously thought, according to a new study.

Tiny plastic fragments not only float on the ocean’s surface, but are also temporarily pushed beneath the top layer of water by the tumult caused by maritime winds, according to the new research. The higher the wind speed, and the more turbulent the gusts, the more mixing that occurs between the upper and lower ocean layers.

Traditional measurements of plastic marine pollutants only account for the top layer of water, since plastic is buoyant.  Researchers studying the plastic patches typically drag a mesh net behind a boat at a depth of 25 centimeters (10 inches) to collect debris, then collect and sort the plastic catch. But these samples taken at the ocean’s surface underestimate the amount of plastic debris present in the world’s oceans, reports a team of scientists led by Tobias Kukulka, of the University of Delaware, and Giora Proskurowski, with the University of Washington.

Kukulka and his colleagues wanted to look deeper, and scour lower depths for debris in a process called subsurface towing. With this method, researchers use a special net that can be lowered to specific depths, in this case five, 10, and 20 meters (16, 33 and 66 feet), while still closed. They then open it to collect debris only at those depths.

“This process allows us to sample only a ‘discrete’ depth, without exposing the open net to other depths,” Proskurowski said.

In the open ocean, plastic breaks into millimeter-sized fragments. (Credit: Kukulka et al.)

Combining data from this and previous studies, researchers constructed a model that included wind-induced mixing of ocean layers, and discovered that the real amount of plastic debris in the ocean is an average of 2.5 times the amount found by only surface towing. In particularly windy conditions, when even more of the plastic has been mixed out of the surface layer, researchers predicted that total plastic content can be as much as 27 times the amount measured at the surface. The research was published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Kukulka and his team trawled about 600 miles east of Bermuda in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million square mile area of water where ocean currents converge and concentrate plastic debris. They chronicled their research in a series of YouTube videos. Some of the team’s members, working with other researchers, had also previously found subsurface plastic three to five meters beneath the surface while trawling in the Pacific Ocean, a finding that the group reported at the AGU-sponsored 2010 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Ore.*

Most of the plastic clogging the world’s oceans is in the form of millimeter-sized fragments, Proskurowski said. These tend to be highly resistant to environmental degradation because of their manufactured durable nature and can pose a threat to marine life. Some aquatic animals ingest stray particles of plastic, which can injure or poison them because of chemicals present within the material. Floating plastic can also transport invasive species between different environments. Removing the debris from the ocean – especially at greater depths – can prove to be a difficult task.

“Our work emphasizes the difficulty of cleaning up the small plastic particles – they are not just at the surface but also in the shallow subsurface,” Proskurowski said.

While researchers don’t yet have enough data to estimate the total amount of plastic in the world’s oceans, Proskurowski said, the pollution problem runs deeper than previously reported.

Kukulka, T., Proskurowski, G., Morét-Ferguson, S., Meyer, D., & Law, K. (2012). The effect of wind mixing on the vertical distribution of buoyant plastic debris Geophysical Research Letters, 39 (7) DOI: 10.1029/2012GL051116

-Eric Villard, AGU science writing intern

*This post has been corrected, due to an editing error. The researchers had presented other, related material at AGU’s 2010 Ocean Science meeting, but not the results described here.

Tornadoes such as this one that recently touched down in Kansas can cause devastating localized damage. Scientists and severe weather experts at a March 29 Capitol Hill briefing stressed the need for better preparation when dealing with destructive twisters. (Credit: NOAA)

More than 250 tornadoes struck the United States in the first three months of 2012, touching down along a corridor from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast. Residents need to be better prepared for these deadly twisters, say scientists and experts on severe weather and emergency preparedness.

Ideally, tornadoes would be forecasted well before they touch down – instead of only minutes before, several experts said during a briefing for members of Congress and congressional staffers held on March 29 in Washington, D.C.

Tornado forecasting has improved over the past two decades, said David Stensrud, chief of the Forecast Research and Development Division at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. In 1986, the time between when forecasters issued a tornado warming and when the twister touched down was three minutes. In 2011, that lead time had increased fivefold to 15 minutes. But Stensrud would like to see the lead time increase even more.

“We still have fatalities – we still need to do better,” Stensrud said. “So the question becomes, how do we improve what we’re already doing?”

Improvement could come in the form of new radar systems, he said. Typically, weather forecasters use Doppler radar to gauge the severity of storms. While effective, Doppler radar is slow and choppy, updating only every four to five minutes, Stensrud explained.

“If you think of a football game, the [Doppler] radar is like watching one play for every set [of plays] that happens,” he said. “You still see the game, you still see what happens, but you miss a lot of the continuity and a lot of the detail.”

Phased array radar, which uses multiple radar beams simultaneously as opposed to Doppler radar’s one beam, would update its data every minute, Stensrud said. That could increase tornado lead times even more. The new radar, combined with more advanced computer modeling of severe weather, could allow forecasters to predict tornadoes up to an hour in advance. Strensrud said this lead time is only about five to 10 years away.

But improved forecasting techniques and increased lead time are not the only important steps when it comes to saving lives. Getting the message to people in a tornado’s path and making sure they respond to it is equally critical, said Keith Stammer, director of the Emergency Management Division in Joplin County, Mo.

Many residents in tornado-prone areas are desensitized to tornado warnings by test sirens and false alarms, Stammer said.

“When someone hears the warning, they must hear it, understand it, believe it, personalize it, decide to act, and act appropriately,” he explained.

A lot of it comes down to psychology, said Julie Demuth, a scientist in the Societal Impacts Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. People often seek confirmation of a threat before acting upon it, whether it is something as small as a smoke alarm going off or as large as a tornado.

So emergency managers should ensure there are multiple warning systems in place and make sure their meanings are clear, Demuth said. One way to help would be to issue different tiers of tornado warnings depending on the storm’s severity and potential damage, she said, something that the National Weather Service is currently considering. But even with these steps, there is always uncertainty inherent in severe weather situations, she said, whether it is uncertainty in how meteorologists forecast them or in how residents react to them.

Eric Villard, AGU science writing intern

A Jan. 5, 2012, fountain eruption at Mount Etna. Researchers have developed a new way to measure the amount of lava flowing from the volcano. (Credit: Gianni Lanzafame)

Italy’s Mount Etna has had a busy year doing what volcanoes do best — erupting and providing volcanologists and sightseers alike with a fiery show. Armed with a new technique to determine lava volumes, researchers can now add up the amount of material that made up the impressive volcanic displays last year.

Mount Etna released nearly 28 million cubic meters (989 million cubic feet) of lava between Jan. 10, 2011, and Jan. 9, 2012, the scientists discovered. That’s enough lava to fill America’s tallest building, Chicago’s Willis (formerly Sears) Tower, nearly 19 times. Or, it’s enough to fill the Empire State Building about 28 times.

The average lava output of Mount Etna was 0.9 cubic meters per second (about 32 cubic feet per second) during 2011, slightly more than the yearly average rate of 0.8 cubic meters per second (about 28 cubic feet per second) that the volcano previously maintained since 1971. This average is taken over the entire year, not just during eruptions, said Gaetana Ganci, a researcher at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia and one of the authors of the new study published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.

“The average output rate of Etna has been constant during the last 30 years, and can result in few high volume lava flows or many low volume lava fountains,” Ganci said.

Mount Etna is known for its lava fountaining (think of a jet of lava bursting through Earth’s crust like a fountain-shaped Fourth of July firework) and strombolian eruptions, which can throw globs of lava and vent volcanic ash hundreds of meters in the air. Both types of eruptions produce lava flows that the scientists measure.

Mount Etna releases a plume of ash thousands of feet into the air on Jan. 5, 2012. (Credit: Gianni Lanzafame)

Researchers in this study estimated lava volumes on the basis of how fast the flows cooled. With Ganci’s method, a satellite-based thermal imager is used to retrieve the change in heat released by Mount Etna’s lava flows. Ganci and her colleagues used data from the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) aboard the Meteosat Second Generation satellite system for their measurements.

One problem with this method arises when volcanic ash blocks thermal satellite readings. In previous attempts to quantify lava amounts, this has led to underestimated volumes. To counteract this, Ganci and her colleagues developed equations and theoretical lava-cooling computer models to fill in the gaps. With this new technique, weather conditions and ash clouds will only impact the data if they obscure the lava completely throughout its entire cooling process, she said.

“This new methodology improves our ability to promptly track and document the short, but intense and potentially hazardous, eruptive events,” Ganci explained.

The methods used in the study have applications beyond Mount Etna, the researcher said, and could be applied to any short-lived volcanic event where thermal satellite imagery is available, which allows the lava flows to be measured from afar.

With the new data from Mount Etna, Ganci and her colleagues also created an online geographic information system (GIS) that helps to forecast the volcano’s lava flows and highlight hazard areas around the Sicilian volcano, based on the routes of previous lava outpourings. As more eruptions occur at Mount Etna, more information will be added to the GIS, allowing volcanologists to better track the effects of these eruptions.

You can create your own strombolian eruption and lava fountain online. It might not be as awe-inspiring as the real thing, but it’s certainly safer.

Ganci, G., Harris, A., Del Negro, C., Guehenneux, Y., Cappello, A., Labazuy, P., Calvari, S., & Gouhier, M. (2012). A year of lava fountaining at Etna: Volumes from SEVIRI Geophysical Research Letters, 39 (6) DOI: 10.1029/2012GL051026

- Eric Villard, AGU science writing intern

Scientists discuss lessons learned from the March 11, 2011 tsunami in Japan at a congressional briefing sponsored by the American Geophysical Union. (Credit: AGU)

A year after the tsunami that devastated the Japanese coastline, the United States still needs to ramp up its tsunami preparedness, experts say.

Scientists at a March 21 Capitol Hill briefing in Washington, D.C., stressed the importance of detecting tsunamis before they reach coastlines and educating the public on tsunami dangers. The briefing was held for members of Congress and their staffers.

Eddie Bernard, director of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle, Wash., spoke to the need for early detection in order to save lives. One way of keeping an eye out for tsunamis is a buoy system called Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART), Bernard said. The buoys, deployed in regions with a history of tsunamis, detect seismic waves and send the information via satellite to researchers.

The laboratory developed and deployed the first DART buoy off the coast of Oregon in 1995. Fifty-seven buoys will be deployed in total by the end of this year. The United States owns 40 and Australia, Chile, Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, and India own a combined total of 14. Japan agreed to purchase three buoys following last year’s tsunami. The system has become an international effort, Bernard said, and the buoys now ring most of the Pacific Ocean. Up-to-date information on wave heights is given for most buoys on the DART website.

“The bonus here is [the buoys] are all standard. Everybody can use other people’s data,” he explained. “That’s part of the international cooperation that I think is so important.”

The next step for the buoys might be relocation, Bernard said. Currently, the buoys sit about 20 minutes away from tsunami source areas, meaning there is about a 20-minute delay before wave height information is relayed to researchers. A shorter distance would mean shorter warning times, and potentially more lives saved.

But detection is only one step in tsunami preparedness.

“Detection and forecasting alone don’t save lives and property,” said John Orcutt, professor of geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., and another speaker at the briefing, sponsored by the American Geophysical Union and several other organizations.

“It didn’t help in Japan a great deal.”

What did help, Orcutt said, were proper risk assessments of potential flooding and damage and education programs about tsunami threats and evacuation procedures. It’s a lesson that should be applied in the United States, he added.

“This is one of the most crucial parts for preparedness in the United States – not necessarily the advances in technology – but actually investing in learning,” Orcutt said.

One area of high tsunami risk for the United States and Canada is the stretch of coastline in the Pacific Northwest that includes Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Just offshore is a major fault called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which scientists estimate could produce earthquakes of magnitude 9 or greater and could result in a potentially devastating tsunami.

Tsunami education leads to decreased panic and more efficient evacuation, said John Schelling, the earthquake and tsunami program manager for the Washington State Emergency Management Division and another briefing speaker. Thanks to a tsunami education program, plus warnings from DART, Washington State officials were able to evacuate only specific communities in danger after the Japanese earthquake – as opposed to calling for mass evacuations of the coast, the program manager said.

“Because our local responders had trained, and our communities had practiced, people were able to get to safety with no issues,” Schelling said.

With locally-triggered tsunamis, such as ones that could originate just off the Washington coast, there might only be a five-minute warning before the waves hit shore, he said. This renders early warning systems ineffective and makes education all the more important.

“There’s no warning system on…this Earth that’s going to get people any type of warning in that amount of time,” he said. “The only thing that’s going to save lives in these events is if people understand where they are in relation to high ground, and know the appropriate action to take.”

Education of the general public is not an easy task, Schelling acknowledged, especially when a large portion of the United States’ population does not live in a tsunami-prone area.  But even those people occasionally visit, he said. Lessons learned from tsunami education could also be applied to any flooding situation, even those caused by heavy rains or hurricanes, Schelling added.

“There is no one flyer, no one commercial that’s going to reach all of these audiences,” he said. “They all have to be engaged individually, and they have to be approached with something that shows what’s in it for them.”

Eric Villard, AGU science writing intern