Effective Sea System and Case Studies (open access)

Effective Sea System and Case Studies

This report describes SEA (Strategic Environmental Assessment), and case studies demonstrating the merits of SEA in Europe and North America. The report is aimed at helping readers understanding and implementing SEA.
Date: June 2003
Creator: Hayashi, Kiichiro; Sadler, Barry; Verheem, Rob; Dusik, Jiri & Tomlinson, Paul
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Outline of the Basic Environment Plan (open access)

Outline of the Basic Environment Plan

This is the third Basic Environment Plan of Japan. The theme of the plan is "integrated improvements of the environment, economy, and society." The plan develops long-term goals and will be assessed by quantitative targets and indicators for management. The plan calls for a clear public information campgaign.
Date: August 2006
Creator: Japan. Kankyōshō.
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Synthesis Report on Observations, Projections, and Impact Assessments of Climate Change: Climate Change and Its Impacts in Japan (open access)

Synthesis Report on Observations, Projections, and Impact Assessments of Climate Change: Climate Change and Its Impacts in Japan

The Japan synthesis report includes causes of global warming, the current state and future of global warming, the impacts of and adaptation to climate change, and methodologies for observing and projecting climate change and impact.
Date: October 2009
Creator: Japan Meteorological Agency
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Year 2010 (open access)

Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Year 2010

The report describes the activities and plans of the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), which incorporates the U.S. Global Change Research Program established under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, and the Climate Change Research Initiative that was established by the President in 2001. CCSP coordinates and integrates scientific research on climate and global change supported by 13 participating departments and agencies of the U.S. Government. The document highlights recent advances and progress supported by CCSP-participating agencies in each of the program's research and observational elements, as called for in the Strategic Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program released in July 2003, and later modified in the 2008 CCSP Revised Research Plan. The document also describes how observational and predictive capabilities are being improved and used to create tools to support decisionmaking at local, regional, and national scales to cope with environmental variability and change.
Date: September 2009
Creator: U.S. Global Change Research Program and Subcommittee on Global Change Research
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library
Remarks by Administrator O'Keefe at the Earth Observation Summit (open access)

Remarks by Administrator O'Keefe at the Earth Observation Summit

Remarks by NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe at the 2003 Earth Observation Summit in Washington, DC. The purpose of the summit was to promote the development of a comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained Earth observation system or systems among governments and the international community to understand and address global environmental and economic challenges, and also to begin a process to develop a conceptual framework and implementation plan for building this integrated Earth observation system. When the space age dawned it was clear that the ability to propel robotic spacecraft and humans beyond the gravity of our home planet would open up untold avenues of exploration and discovery throughout the Solar System and beyond. What was not understood at the time was how comprehensive observations of the Earth system from space would lead to a significant new field of scientific inquiry.
Date: July 31, 2003
Creator: O'Keefe, Sean
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
More El Niños May Mean More Rainfall Extremes (open access)

More El Niños May Mean More Rainfall Extremes

Researchers at NASA and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), studying changes in tropical precipitation patterns, have noted a higher frequency of El Niños and La Niñas over the last 21 years. In addition, when either of those events occur, the world can expect more months with unusually high or low precipitation with droughts more common than floods over land areas.
Date: January 16, 2001
Creator: Earth Observatory
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
NOAA Updates What Defines Normal Temperature (open access)

NOAA Updates What Defines Normal Temperature

Normal temperatures and precipitation levels for your area may have changed as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center recently released new 'normal' data for about 8,000 weather stations. The data defines the normal temperature at locations across the United States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and U.S. Pacific Islands. These data are used as a benchmark for weather forecasters to calculate day-to-day temperature and rainfall departures from typical levels and are also used by business, government and industry for planning, design and operations.
Date: September 6, 2001
Creator: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Our Changing Planet: The FY 2001 U.S. Global Change Research Program (open access)

Our Changing Planet: The FY 2001 U.S. Global Change Research Program

This report, prepared under the auspices of the President's National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), highlights the Program's recent research and describes future plans and goals. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was established in 1989 and authorized by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The first edition of Our Changing Planet was transmitted to the Congress as a supplement to the FY1990 budget. In just over a decade, the USGCRPhas generated remarkable improvements to our knowledge of Earth's global-scale environmental processes and helped identify and explain the causes and consequences of a series of global environmental changes, including ozone depletion and climate change.
Date: September 2000
Creator: Subcommittee on Global Change Research, Committee on Environment and Natural Resources of the National Science and Technology Council
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Our Changing Planet:  The Fiscal Year 2003 U.S. Global Change Research Program and Climate Change Research Initiative (open access)

Our Changing Planet: The Fiscal Year 2003 U.S. Global Change Research Program and Climate Change Research Initiative

This document is a supplement to the President's Fiscal Year 2003 Budget. The report describes the activities and plans of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The report also describes the start-up activities for the U.S. Climate Change Research Initiative (CCRI), established by President George W. Bush to accelerate research on climate change. The CCRI supplements the ongoing USGCRP work by providing focus and targeting resources to areas where significant 2 to 5 year improvements in decision-relevant information are possible.
Date: 2002
Creator: Climate Change Science Program (U.S.)
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
New Source of Natural Fertilizer Discovered in Oceans (open access)

New Source of Natural Fertilizer Discovered in Oceans

New findings suggest that the deep ocean is teeming with organisms that produce essential natural fertilizers. A National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research team led by Jonathan Zehr, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has discovered a previously unknown type of photosynthetic bacteria that fixes nitrogen, converting nitrogen from the atmosphere into a form other organisms can use.
Date: August 8, 2001
Creator: National Science Foundation (U.S.). Office of Legislative and Public Affairs.
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone:  Science Plan and Implementation Strategy (open access)

Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone: Science Plan and Implementation Strategy

Coastal zones play a key role in Earth System functioning, by contributing significantly to the life support systems of most societies. Human activities modifying riverine hydrology and riverine material fluxes to the coastal zone, have increased in both scale and rate of change in the last 200 years. The underlying processes that drive changes to coastal systems occur at a multiplicity of temporal and spatial scales. These changes alter the availability of ecosystem goods and services. However, disciplinary fragmentation impedes our ability to understand the regional and global changes that affect coastal systems, and thus limits our ability to guide management and decision making. Progress has been made in understanding the changes in Earth System processes that affect the coastal zone, and the role of coastal systems in global change. This includes identifying proxies that describe the state of coastal systems under existing conditions and change scenarios. Typologies have been developed to assist in the interpolation of results into areas where primary information is lacking. This has enabled a first-order up-scaling to a global synthesis.
Date: 2005
Creator: Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Global Land Project: Science Plan and ImplementationStrategy (open access)

Global Land Project: Science Plan and ImplementationStrategy

The Global Land Project (GLP) Science Plan and Implementation Strategy represents the joint research agenda of IGBP and IHDP to improve the understanding of land system dynamics in the context of Earth System functioning. This plan is therefore a first critical step in addressing the interaction between people and their environments. It is part of the broader efforts to understand how these interactions have affected, and may yet affect, the sustainability of the terrestrial biosphere, and the two-way interactions and feedbacks between different land systems within the Earth System. GLP will play a clear role in improving the understanding of regional and global-scale land systems, as well as promoting strong scientific synergy across the global change programmes. This Science Plan and Implementation Strategy develops a new integrated paradigm focused on two main conceptual aspects of the coupled system: firstly, it deals with the interface between people, biota, and natural resources of terrestrial systems, and secondly, it combines detailed regional studies with a global, comparative perspective. GLP takes as its points of departure ecosystem services and human decision making for the terrestrial environment. These topics are at the interface of the societal and the environmental domains, and serve as conceptual lenses …
Date: September 2005
Creator: Global Land Project (GLP)
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Integrated Land Ecosystem-Atmosphere Processes Study: Science Plan and Implementation Strategy (open access)

Integrated Land Ecosystem-Atmosphere Processes Study: Science Plan and Implementation Strategy

The iLEAPS Science Plan and Implementation Strategy defines the scientific objectives and key research issues of the land-atmosphere project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. It also outlines a strategy for addressing the key research questions. The scope of iLEAPS research spans from molecular level processes - such as synthesis of volatile organic compounds in vegetation - to Earth System science issues, climate and global change. iLEAPS research emphasises the importance of connections, feedbacks and teleconnections between the numerous processes in the land-atmosphere interface. Due to the complexity and wide range of scientific issues, iLEAPS stresses the need for increased integrative approaches and collaboration, involving scientists from various disciplines, experimentalists and modellers, and international research projects and programmes.
Date: 2005
Creator: Integrated Land Ecosystem-Atmosphere Processes Study
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Science Plan and Implementation Strategy (open access)

Science Plan and Implementation Strategy

This Science Plan and Implementation Strategy sets out the research agenda for the second phase of IGBP. The document describes the IGBP strategy for producing high quality, unbiased, credible, fundamental scientific research in the area of global change: a strategy centered on ten projects, to be carried out by the several thousand scientists worldwide who are part of the IGBP network. Further, the document describes how the organization will communicate the results of this research to different audiences, in order to realize its vision: "to provide scientific knowledge to improve the sustainability of the living Earth".
Date: 2006
Creator: International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Years 2004 and  2005 (open access)

Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Years 2004 and 2005

This edition of Our Changing Planet includes a review of the Strategic Plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) from 2003 and outlines how the CCSP is moving forward to implement the Strategic Plan during FY 2004 and FY 2005. As a part of this implementation, the report announces the production of 21 scientific syntheses and assessments on a range of topics to support informed discussion of climate variability and associated issues by decision makers and the public.
Date: July 2004
Creator: Climate Change Science Program (U.S.)
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library
Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Year 2006 (open access)

Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Year 2006

This Fiscal Year 2006 edition of Our Changing Planet describes a wide range of new and emerging observational capabilities which, combined with the Climate Change Science Program’s analytical work, lead to advances in understanding the underlying processes responsible for climate variability and change. The report highlights progress being made to explore the uses and limitations of evolving knowledge to manage risks and opportunities related to climate variability, and documents activities to promote cooperation between the U.S. scientific community and its worldwide counterparts.
Date: November 2005
Creator: Climate Change Science Program (U.S.)
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library
Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program, 2007 (open access)

Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program, 2007

This Fiscal Year 2007 edition of Our Changing Planet describes a wide range of new and emerging observational capabilities which, combined with the Climate Change Science Program’s analytical work, lead to advances in understanding the underlying processes responsible for climate variability and change. The report highlights progress in exploring the uses and limitations of evolving knowledge to manage risks and opportunities related to climate variability, and documents activities to promote cooperation between the U.S. scientific community and its worldwide counterparts.
Date: November 2006
Creator: Climate Change Science Program (U.S.)
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Year 2008 (open access)

Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program for Fiscal Year 2008

This report describes the activities and plans of the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), which incorporates the U.S. Global Change Research Program, established under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, and the Climate Change Research Initiative, established by the President in 2001. CCSP coordinates and integrates scientific research on climate and global change supported by 13 participating departments and agencies of the U.S. Government. The document describes a wide range of advances in understanding the underlying processes responsible for climate variability and change, such as advances in understanding of climate change at high latitudes. It also describes progress on understanding the ongoing and projected effects of climate change on nature and society, including the interconnected relationships between climate, forests, and wildfire. The document also describes how observational and predictive capabilities are being improved and used to create tools to support decision making at local, regional, and national scales to cope with environmental variability and change.
Date: 2007
Creator: Climate Change Science Program (U.S.)
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library
Global Change and Mountain Regions:  The Mountain Research Initiative (open access)

Global Change and Mountain Regions: The Mountain Research Initiative

The strong altitudinal gradients in mountain regions provide unique and sometimes the best opportunities to detect and analyse global change processes and phenomena. Meteorological, hydrological, cryospheric and ecological conditions change strongly over relatively short distances; thus biodiversity tends to be high, and characteristic sequences of ecosystems and cryospheric systems are found along mountain slopes. The boundaries between these systems experience shifts due to environmental change and thus may be used as indicators of such changes. The higher parts of many mountain ranges are not affected by direct human activities. These areas include many national parks and other protected environments. They may serve as locations where the environmental impacts of climate change alone, including changes in atmospheric chemistry, can be studied directly. Mountain regions are distributed all over the globe, from the Equator almost to the poles and from oceanic to highly continental climates. This global distribution allows us to perform comparative regional studies and to analyse the regional differentiation of environmental change processes as characterised above. Therefore, within the IGBP an Initiative for Collaborative Research on Global Change and Mountain Regions was developed, which strives to achieve an integrated approach for observing, modelling and investigating global change phenomena and processes …
Date: 2001
Creator: Bekcer, Alfred & Bugmann, Harald
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Surface Ocean - Lower Atmosphere Study: Science Plan and Implementation Strategy (open access)

The Surface Ocean - Lower Atmosphere Study: Science Plan and Implementation Strategy

SOLAS (Surface Ocean - Lower Atmosphere Study) is a new international research initiative that has as its goal: To achieve quantitative understanding of the key biogeochemical-physical interactions and feedbacks between the ocean and the atmosphere, and of how this coupled system affects and is affected by climate and environmental change. Achievement of this goal is important in order to understand and quantify the role that ocean-atmosphere interactions play in the regulation of climate and global change. The domain of SOLAS is focussed on processes at the air-sea interface and includes a natural emphasis on the atmospheric and upper-ocean boundary layers, while recognising that some of the processes to be studied will, of necessity, be linked to significantly greater height and depth scales. SOLAS research will cover all ocean areas including coastal seas and ice covered areas. A fundamental characteristic of SOLAS is that the research is not only interdisciplinary (involving biogeochemistry, physics, mathematical modelling, etc.), but also involves closely coupled studies requiring marine and atmospheric scientists to work together. Such research will require a shift in attitude within the academic and funding communities, both of which are generally organised on a medium-by-medium basis in most countries.
Date: 2004
Creator: Broadgate, Wendy & Young, Bill
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences (open access)

Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences

This Synthesis and Assessment Product is an important revision to the conclusions of earlier reports from the U.S. National Research Council and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies. This Synthesis and Assessment Product is an important revision to the conclusions of earlier reports from the U.S. National Research Council and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For recent decades, all current atmospheric data sets now show global-average warming that is similar to the surface warming. While these data are consistent with the results from climate models at the global scale, discrepancies in the tropics remain to be resolved. Nevertheless, the most recent observational and model evidence has increased confidence in our understanding …
Date: April 2006
Creator: U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library
NOAA Makes New Tree Ring Data Available (open access)

NOAA Makes New Tree Ring Data Available

New data from tree rings from 500 sites around the world are now available from NOAA. These data are important because they provide climate scientists and resource managers with records of past climatic variability extending back thousands of years.
Date: October 17, 2001
Creator: NOAA News
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Decision-Support Experiments and Evaluations using Seasonal-to-Interannual Forecasts and Observational Data: A Focus on Water Resources (open access)

Decision-Support Experiments and Evaluations using Seasonal-to-Interannual Forecasts and Observational Data: A Focus on Water Resources

This Synthesis and Assessment Product focuses on the connection between the scientific ability to predict climate on seasonal scales and the opportunity to incorporate such understanding into water resource management decisions. It directly addresses decision support experiments and evaluations that have used seasonal-to-interannual forecasts and observational data, and is expected to inform (1) decision makers about the relative success of experiences of others who have experimented with these forecasts and data in resource management; (2) climatologists, hydrologists, and social scientists on how to advance the delivery of decision-support resources that use the most recent forecast products, methodologies, and tools; and (3) science and resource managers as they plan for future investments in research related to forecasts and their role in decision support. It is important to note, however, that while the focus of this Product is on the water resources management sector, the findings within this Synthesis and Assessment Product may be directly transferred to other sectors.
Date: January 2009
Creator: Beller-Simms, Nancy; Ingram, Helen; Feldman, David; Mantua, Nathan; Jacobs, Katharine L. & Waple, Anne M.
Object Type: Book
System: The UNT Digital Library
Environmental Variability and Climate Change (open access)

Environmental Variability and Climate Change

The PAGES research community works toward improving our understanding of the Earth's changing environment. By placing current and future global changes in a long term perspective, they can be assessed relative to natural variability. Since the industrial revolution, the Earth System has become increasingly affected by human activities. Natural and human processes are woven into a complex tapestry of forcings, responses, feedbacks and consequences. Deciphering this complexity is essential as we plan for the future. Paleoenvironmental research is the only way to investigate Earth System processes that operate on timescales longer than the period of instrumental records.
Date: 2001
Creator: Past Global Changes (PAGES)
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library