Governor Brown's new Executive Order, issued today is a banner day for our climate change efforts

From Bruce Riordan, at the Climate Readiness Institute. 

Bay Area Climate Stakeholders: Governor Brown's new Executive Order, issued today is a banner day for our climate change efforts. 

1. The Executive Order sets a new interim goal for GHG reduction—40% below 1990 levels by 2030.

2. The Executive Order, for the first time, outlines a series of steps the State will take to address climate adaptation and resilience. 

See the press release, reaction from world leaders, and the full Executive Order at: http://gov.ca.gov/home.php

Karin in the news! Google camera helps capture bay’s rising sea levels

Neat article about Google teaming up with the nonprofit San Francisco Baykeeper to use Google Street View technology to map tides and sea level rise around the Bay. Former kellylabber Karin Tuxen-Bettman is involved. 

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Google-camera-helps-capture-bay-s-rising-sea-6080481.php#photo-7524438

Update from the White House on their Climate Data Initiative

Yesterday the White House launched the second phase of the Climate Data Initiative, focused on leveraging climate data and innovation to make food systems more resilient to climate change and reduce the impact of agriculture on climate change.  We are delighted to have a range of Administration announcements and private sector commitments that came together for today’s news.
 
Here is a fact sheet describing what they are announcing today: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/07/29/fact-sheet-empowering-america-s-agricultural-sector-and-strengthening-fo
 
And here’s a blog from White House Science Advisor John Holdren and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on the launch: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/07/29/unleashing-climate-data-empower-america-s-agricultural-sector

Please share these widely with your partners and networks. Thanks for your support for the initiative and your commitment to acting on climate change!

NASA challenge announced: Open NASA Earth Exchange 2014

President Obama has announced a series of executive actions to reduce carbon pollution and promote sound science to understand and manage climate impacts for the U.S. 

Following the President’s call for developing tools for climate resilience, NEX is hosting a workshop that will feature:

1. Climate science through lectures by experts;
2. Computational tools through virtual labs; and
3. A challenge inviting participants to compete for prizes by designing and implementing solutions for climate resilience.

An particularly exciting part of this initiative is the possibility to win cash prizes for innovative research ideas. You can find more information about labs and lectures here at https://nex.nasa.gov/opennex
and to participate in the challenge, you can go directly at https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9933584.

Pay attention! Especially grad students and young researchers! The first part of the challenge is the ideation challenge which will close on the 31st of July, 2014 and will follow up with another solvers challenge based on the ideas as selected form the ideation challenge. This will run through October so ample time to participate and win prizes.

White House Launches new Climate Data Initiative...

We are in the lovely "Indian Treaty" room.And we were there! Kevin and I went to the White House (here is photographic proof) to represent Cal-Adapt.

The President’s Climate Data Initiative was launched March 19th with the tagline: Empowering America’s Communities to Prepare for the Effects of Climate Change. The initiative is a complex partnership of government, industry, academia and local public to get the US ready for climate change. The overall goal of the climate data initiative is "Spark Innovation": release data, articulate challenges, turn data scientists loose. Here is the fact sheet and a blog post from John Podesta and John Holdren.

We saw some very interesting short talks from a range of speakers. Here are some highlights:

Jack Dangermond highlighted the many initiatives that ESRI is pushing to help with climate resilience. Kathyrn Sullivan from NOAA discussed her concept of "Environmental Intelligence", which describes the use of data to create resilience. She says: "NOAA capture 20TB daily, they release 2TB daily. Upon that data stream are built all the climate businesses we have today. What would this industry be like if we release the other 18TB?" Ellen Stofan from NASA talked about new earth observation missions, including satellites for precipitation, soil moisture, CO2, winds, aerosols. She announced another of a series of data driven challenges called "coastal inundation in your community". Rachel Kyte from the World Bank called their multiple initiatives "Open Data for Resilience". She said that climate change may eradicate the mission of the World Bank, because of its disproportionate impact on poorer communities worldwide. Rebecca More from Google gave us a fantastic overview of the Landsat, climate and topography missions that Google Earth Engine is working on. Google is contributing 1PT cloud storage, and 50 million CPU hours of collaboration.

Videos:

• John Podesta, Counselor to the President, The White House
• Jack Dangermond, Founder and CEO, Esri
• Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan,  Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, U.S. Department of Commerce
• Stephen Harper, Global Director, Environment and Energy Policy,  Intel Corporation
• Joel Dunn, Executive Director, Chesapeake Conservancy
• Denice Ross, Director of Enterprise Information, City of New Orleans
• Dr. Ellen Stofan, Chief Scientist, NASA
• Rachel Kyte,  Vice President and Special Envoy for Climate Change, The World Bank
• Rebecca Moore, Founder, Google Earth Engine

All was very inspiring and informative.

Here are some press links about the Initiative:

• http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/03/19/climate-data-initiative-launches-strong-public-and-private-sector-commitments
• http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/19/fact-sheet-president-s-climate-data-initiative-empowering-america-s-comm
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/19/wh-launches-new-climate-data-initiative-wednesday/
• The Indian Treaty Room where we mingled: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Treaty_Room
  (By the way, the Bretton Woods agreements, the peace treaties with Italy, Hungary, and Romania after World War II, and the United Nations Charter were all signed in this room.)

Big Data for sustainability: an uneven track record with great potential

An interesting position piece on the appropriate uses of big data for climate resilience. The author, Amy Luers, points out three opportunities and three risks.

She sums up:

"The big data revolution is upon us. How this will contribute to the resilience of human and natural systems remains to be seen. Ultimately, it will depend on what trade-offs we are willing to make. For example, are we willing to compromise some individual privacy for increased community resilience, or the ecological systems on which they depend?—If so, how much, and under what circumstances?"

Read more from this interesting article here.

Just how much do we need the rain?

Reservoir Drought Monitor Categories - Sep 30, 2013

From DWR's California Data Exchange Center - Reservoirs.

Callfornia is a pretty dry state as we roll into the winter season, but the bad news is spread over the state in different ways.  As of September 30, 17 of the 18 main reservoirs in the state are below 50% of normal storage percentiles. That is not quite as bad as it sounds, 5 of these reservoirs - Friant, Tahoe, New Bullards Bar, Almador and our very own Camanche/Pardee (which catches the lovely water of the Mokolumne River and satiates us EBMUDders) - are classified as "Normal" status. Three reservoirs - Cachima, Casitas and Isabella - are classified as "Drought Severe" status. Those three are in the southern portion of the state.

For more on our water supplies, check out http://cdec.water.ca.gov.

In case you want to know more about the water we drink in Berkeley, the Mokelumne River is a 95-mile-long river flowing west from the central Sierra Nevada into the Central Valley and ultimately the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, where it empties into the San Joaquin River. Together with its main tributary, the Cosumnes River, the Mokelumne drains 2,143 square miles (5,550 km²) in parts of five California counties.

The Upper Mokelumne River stretches from the headwaters to Pardee Reservoir in the Sierra foothills, and the Lower Mokelumne River is the portion of the river below Camanche Dam. Camanche and Pardee dams provide water for the east San Francisco Bay Area through the Mokelumne Aqueduct.

The name is Plains Miwok and is constructed from moke, meaning fishnet, and -umne, a suffix meaning "people of". Thanks Wikipedia!

San Francisco circa 2072

SF archipelago, c. 2072

Some fun before the semester starts! Like something out of a great scifi novel: from Burrito Justice (and via Mark O.) "March 20th, 2072 (AP), Northern California Association of City States: With the surprising acceleration of sea level rise due to the melting of both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets over the past decade, the San Francisco canal system was officially abandoned this week. Additional ferry service has been announced between the new major islands of the San Franciscan Archipelago while the boring machines make progress under the Van Ness Passage and Richmond Pass for new transit tunnels." This rad poster is available for sale!

California Climate Change Portal

Climate change is expected to have significant, widespread impacts on California's economy and environment. California's unique and valuable natural treasures - hundreds of miles of coastline, high value forestry and agriculture, snow-melt fed fresh water supply, vast snow and water fueled recreational opportunities, as well as other natural wonders - are especially at risk.

California is leading the way with prevention measures to reduce greenhouse gases, but no matter how quickly we cut our climate polluting emissions, climate impacts will still occur. Many impacts - increased fires, floods, severe storms and heat waves - are occurring already and will only become more frequent and more costly. There are many things we can do to protect against climate change impacts. Taking steps now to prepare for and adapt to climate change will protect public health and safety, our economy and our future.

The state of California has released the Climate Change Portal, where you will find resources you can use and actions you can take to address both climate change prevention and climate change adaptation. Cal-adapt is a big part of the portal.

Drought imagery from MODIS

As the warm weather moves west this week we think about those battling the drought in the midwest and northern states. Here is a shot from July from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor, on the Terra satellite.  The map contrasts plant health in the United States between June 25 and July 10, 2012, against the average conditions between 2002 and 2012. Brown areas show where plant growth was less vigorous than normal; cream colors depict normal levels of growth; and green indicates abnormally lush vegetation. Data was not available in the gray areas due to snow or cloud cover. From NASA.