Meteorologists couldn’t explain why ozone levels spiked Tuesday in Hampton Roads prompting the region’s first “unhealthy” air alert in two years. A new $30 million NASA program that aims to eventually monitor air quality from space could help end such mysteries. Led by NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, scientists will fly over four metropolitan areas — Baltimore-Washington, D.C., Houston, Sacramento and a to-be-determined city — to measure air pollution. … Read ahead
Source: articles.dailypress.com
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The data was collected from NASA’s ICESat, Terra and Aqua satellites. The latter two satellites are responsible for most of NASA’s Gulf spill imagery. The data collected will help scientists understand how the world’s forests both store and process carbon. While there are many local and regional canopy maps, this is the very first global map using a uniform method for measure. … 
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PASADENA, Calif., May 20 (UPI) — A NASA-led study has determined the upper layer of Earth’s global ocean has warmed since 1993, indicating a strong climate change signal. The international study, co-authored by Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, determined the energy currently stored in the ocean is enough to power nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs for each of the roughly 6.7 billion people on the planet. “We are seeing the global ocean store more heat than it gives off,” said John Lyman, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research. Lyman led the study that analyzed nine different estimates of heat content in the upper ocean from 1993 to 2008. “The ocean is the biggest reservoir for heat in the climate system,” Willis said. “So as the planet warms, we’re finding that 80 to 90 percent of the increased heat ends up in the ocean.” The researchers explained a warming ocean is a direct cause of global sea level rise, since seawater expands and takes up more space as it heats. The researchers said that expansion accounts for about one-third to one-half of global sea level rise. The team that included scientists from Britain’s Headley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, the University of Hamburg in Germany and the Meteorological Research Institute in Japan reports its findings in the journal Nature. … 
The faculty at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics presented the designs to NASA last month as part of a $2.1m (£1.5m) research programme intended to develop environmental and performance concepts that will shape the agency’s aeronautics research over the next 25 years. As part of the project the MIT team was tasked with developing two new commercial aircraft designs that would burn 70 per cent less fuel, emit 75 per cent less nitrogen oxides (NOx) than current planes and could take off using significantly shorter runways. They delivered a design for a 180-passenger plane, dubbed the “double bubble ” series, which could serve as a replacement for the Boeing 737-class aircraft that are widely used for short-haul flights. That design was accompanied by plans for a 350-passenger H “hybrid wing body ” plane to replace the 777-class aircraft commonly used for international flights. According to Mark Drela, lead designer of the D Series, the design would have to travel about 10 per cent slower than a 737, but he added that the repositioning of the engines at the rear of the plane, use of longer wings and reconfiguring of the cross section would significantly reduce drag, allowing engines to burn less fuel for the same amount of thrust. “Little five per cent changes add up to one big change,” he said in a statement, adding that while the plane would be slower than current commercial aircrafts, time could be saved on commercial routes because the plane’s design would allow for faster loading and unloading. The aim of the NASA-backed project is to deliver designs that could be turned into a commercial reality by 2035, but the MIT team also provided designs for a version of the D Series that could be built using conventional aluminum and existing jet technology that could feasibly be produced sooner and would still cut fuel use in half. The larger H Series design uses similar principles to the D Series, positioning the engine at the rear of the aircraft and using longer, thinner wings. But it also features a triangular-shaped hybrid wing body design that allows for more passengers and improved aerodynamics. The MIT research is part of a wide-ranging project from NASA that has also seen Boeing, GE Aviation and Northrop Grumman contracted to undertake research into next-generation subsonic commercial aircraft designs, and Boeing and Lockheed-Martin tasked with exploring how supersonic jets could be used for commercial aircraft. The MIT team now hopes to receive a decision from NASA within the next few months on whether it has been selected for the second phase of the programme, which will provide it with funding to continue research into how new propulsion system technology could be integrated with the designs. MIT said that even if the designs are not chosen for the second phase of the project, the research team hopes to continue work on them through the testing of smaller models at the Institute’s own wind tunnel and ongoing work with aircraft manufacturers. … 
At 3 p.m. EDT on May 18, NASA’s Aqua satellite swept over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill from its vantage point in space and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument captured sunglints in a visible image of the spill. … 
Snapshot of disaster: Four hundred miles out in space, Nasa’s Aqua satellite has taken pictures of the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. In this image from Sunday, the centre of it is …