Ramblemuse Touch Points

I’m off to San Francisco again for more of the AGU conference and tonight’s Science Writer’s dinner. Yesterday I caught the press conference on the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), scheduled to fly “not before 30 January”. The OCO session talks and posters are today and tomorrow. The OCO takes us from about 100 flask samples of carbon dioxide concentrations per day to global coverage every sixteen days. The OCO flys in a polar orbit that precesses in longitude around the globe covering a 10 km wide swath in each pass-over. Because the orbit interlaces, it gets around the globe faster than 16 days, but that’s what it takes to fill in the spaces between individual swaths. The OCO will give a lot more data to increase understanding of magnitudes and seasonal behavior of sources and sinks of CO_2.

I also caught a talk on the vulnerability of California to climate change. We get our rainfall in only about 120 days of the year, so slight shifts in precipitation patterns can make a big difference. We also depend on accumulating Sierra snow-pack, rather than having it come down as more rain, so temperature makes a big difference in water management. As population in California continues to increase, more of this will occur in inland valleys, which also are expected to have more extreme heat days with global warming. Predictions are that warming will be larger in summer than in winter. Went by the California Water Resources exhibit booth later in the day and picked up a report and several CDs. More on those later.

I’ve had little time for longish blogs this fall, but after the NASW conference in Palo Alto this past October, I have been Twittering.