State launches new climate adaptation portal

A new state website under the Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) has launched. The Hawai’i Climate Adaptation Portal, or Poli Na Mea a Pau, which translates to “all things are related,” will provide the public with information on climate change and its impacts not only to Hawai’i, but to other coastal states and locations worldwide. Information from the Interagency Climate Adaptation Committee (ICAC) will also be provided on the website.

“The impacts of climate change are far reaching and will have dramatic effects on Hawai’i’s economy, health, environment and way of life,” said Sam Lemmo, the administrator of the DLNR Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands and co-chair of the ICAC. “These impacts are all related and it’s important that we consider them all as we prepare adaptation strategies.”

In addition to the ICAC, DLNR, and Office of Planning (OP), SOEST and the University of Hawai’i Sea Grant College Program (UHSC) are in the process of planning a sea level rise vulnerability and adaptation workshop for February 2016.

Creating renewable gasoline

Creating gasoline and biodiesel from readily available microbial organisms may sound too good to be true, but that is exactly what researchers at the Hawaiʻi Natural Energy Institute (HNEI) are doing. A new one-pot process is described in a recent publication by HNEI Postdoctoral Fellow Shimin Kang and Researcher Jian Yu.

“As we refine this process, we will be able to simplify and bring down the cost of converting renewable feedstock to commercially viable transportation fuel,” said researcher Kang.

Read more about it in the UH System News and at ScienceDirect.

UH researchers shed new light on the origins of Earth’s water

Water covers more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface, but its exact origins are still something of a mystery. Scientists have long been uncertain whether water was present at the formation of the planet, or if it arrived later, perhaps carried by comets and meteorites. Now researchers from the University of Hawai‘i at Mhttp://www.livescience.com/52778-earth-water-origins-ancient-dust.htmlānoa, using advanced ion-microprobe instrumentation, have found that rocks from Baffin Island in Canada contain evidence that Earth’s water was a part of our planet from the beginning.

Their research is published in the 13 November issue of the journal Science in a paper entitled “Evidence for primordial water in Earth’s deep mantle.” The research team was led by cosmochemist Lydia Hallis, then a postdoctoral fellow at the UH NASA Astrobiology Institute (UHNAI) and now Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. UH co-authors are Gary Huss, Kazuhide Nagashima, G. Jeffrey Taylor, Mike Mottl, and Karen Meech. The work was performed in the W. M. Keck Cosmochemistry Lab.

More launches ahead for the Hawaiʻi Space Flight Laboratory

The Hawaiʻi Space Flight Laboratory (HSFL) is currently preparing for five space launches in the next two years with more opportunities on the horizon. “Hawaiʻi and the University of Hawaiʻi are now considered players in the aerospace industry,” said HSFL Director Luke Flynn.

HSFL had a key role in the first attempted space launch from Hawaiʻi in November 2015 from Kauaʻi’s Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF). Though the launch was unsuccessful, the years of research and work leading up to it created a foundation that has put Hawaiʻi on the aerospace map. HSFL designed and constructed the primary payload for the mission, a hyperspectral imaging satellite. More than 150 UH students gained real world experience building the sophisticated satellite that passed a rigorous NASA-based testing process before it was approved for a space launch.

“It proved that UH has the equipment and expertise to build and test small spacecraft,” said Flynn. “HSFL has clean-room facilities and small-satellite test equipment to fully train the next generation of small-satellite engineers.”

Hawaiʻi now has a rocket launch pad and a rail launcher at PMRF that were built for the November 2015 mission, critical assets for future space launches.

Read more about it, and watch video of the launch, in the UH System News; read more about it in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (subscription required).

La Niña is not helping Hawaiʻi’s rainfall and groundwater

Historically when El Niño events occur, Hawaiʻi has experienced nearly six months of drought, from November to April. Conversely, during La Niña events rainfall has been greater than normal, building up Hawaiʻi’s groundwater supply. New research published this month in the Journal of Climate by scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology and NOAA’s Honolulu National Weather Service (NWS) Office, determined that the relationship between La Niña and rainfall in Hawaiʻi has changed and recent La Niña years have brought less-than-normal rainfall. Because the La Niña events have brought excess rainfall to the state in the past, the new information indicating decreased rainfall during recent La Niña events has important implications for agriculture, water resource management and more.

“Initially, this changing relationship between La Niña and Hawaiʻi rainfall was brought to my attention by Kevin Kodama [co-author of the paper and hydrologist at NOAA’s Honolulu NWS],” said co-author Pao-Shin Chu, professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Hawaiʻi state climatologist. “However, we had no idea when this shift occurred, nor any comprehensive analysis to understand the mechanisms for this change.”

Read more about it in the UH System News, Raising Islands, and KHON2.

New research uses surface features to predict weathering of rocks beneath

Just below Earth’s surface, beneath the roots and soil, is a hard, dense layer of bedrock that is the foundation for all life on land. Cracks and fissures within the bedrock provide pathways for air and water, which chemically react to break up rock, ultimately creating soil — an essential ingredient for all terrestrial organisms. This weathering of bedrock is fundamental to life on Earth.

Accurate predictions of where open fractures are beneath the surface are valuable for additional reasons. Fractures in the bedrock affect where drinking water will flow; the paths that magma takes as it moves to the surface in volcanic eruptions; the strength of rock masses on slopes; and how severe shaking will be during earthquakes.

Now scientists at UH Mānoa, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Wyoming and elsewhere have found a way to predict the extent of bedrock weathering, given a location’s topography – the shape and features on the surface. The results are published in the journal Science. Steve Martel, professor of Geology and Geophysics (G&G), and the team developed a stress model that estimated the thickness of this critical zone, given the forces generated by topography, gravity and plate tectonics.

Read more about it in the UH System News or Hawaii Public Radio.

Computer model developed for predicting the dispersion of vog

A paper published this month in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society details the development and utility of a computer model for the dispersion of volcanic smog or “vog,” which forms when volcanic sulfur dioxide gas interacts with water and coverts it to acid sulfate aerosol particles in the atmosphere.

Vog poses a serious threat to the health of Hawai‘i’s people as well as being harmful to the state’s ecosystems and agriculture. Even at low concentrations, which can be found far from the volcano, vog can provoke asthma attacks in those with prior respiratory conditions. It also damages vegetation and crops downwind from the volcano.

Scientists from SOEST, under the leadership of Steven Businger, and in collaboration with researchers at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO), developed a computer model for predicting the dispersion of vog. The vog model uses measurements of the amount of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) emitted by Kilauea, along with predictions of the prevailing winds, to forecast the movement of vog around the state [see the Vog Measurement and Prediction Project (VMAP) page].

Read more about it and watch the video report at KHON2; read more about it in the UH Mānoa News, the Hawaii Tribune Herald, and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (subscription required).

Coral reef resiliency research draws high-profile investments

Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) director and coral expert Ruth Gates and her team are racing against time and climate change to breed corals that can withstand future ocean conditions and that can be used to restore and build resilience in our reefs. Part of that work involves figuring out why healthy brown corals thrive while those growing right next door turn white or bleach, a sign that signals stress. Said Gates, “Everybody is affected by it here in Hawaiʻi because the reef is intimately linked to our health and our economy.”

Gates has multi-million dollar support for her world-class research from a number of prominent sources. In August, a company formed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen called Vulcan announced a $4-million dollar investment into Gates’ and a collaborator’s research. Other support came earlier in the form of a powerful confocal microscope, funded by a million-dollar 2009 donation from philanthropist Pam Omidyar. This powerful tool provides new insights into corals and the marine microorganisms that interact with them. Healthy corals display vibrant, vivid colors. Stressed corals literally pale by comparison.

Read more about it and watch the video reports at UH System News, The Economist, The Huffington Post, and USA Today; read about it in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, ABC News, The Guardian, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Rocket launch from Hawaiʻi carrying UH payload experiences anomaly

The U.S. Navy along with the U.S. Air Force’s Operationally Responsive Space Office, in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, the University of Hawaiʻi’s Hawaiʻi Space Flight Laboratory, the Pacific Missile Range Facility and Aerojet Rocketdyne Corp. launched the first rocket from Hawaiʻi. After take-off, the experimental launch vehicle experienced an anomaly. ORS is currently assessing the cause.

The rocket was launched from the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands, Kauaʻi, through a mission known as ORS-4. The mission was sponsored by the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Operationally Responsive Space Office and was the first launch of the Super Strypi launch system. The rocket was carrying UH’s hyperspectral imager as the primary payload, along with 12 cubesats in an integrated payload stack.

Read more about it and watch the videos at the UH System News and KITV4; read more about it in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and the Pacific Business News.

Rapidly acidifying waters pose major threat for Southern Ocean ecosystem

As a result of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, the chemistry of the Southern Ocean is expected to change so fast over the next few decades that tiny creatures called pteropods at the base of the food web may soon struggle to form their shells. New research by scientists from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM) and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) finds that for some organisms the onset of such critical conditions will be so abrupt, and the duration of events so long, that adaption may become impossible.

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, uses a number of Earth system models to explore how the uptake of human-induced carbon dioxide and the resulting ocean acidification will affect the Southern Ocean over the next century.

Lead author of the study Claudine Hauri is a chemical oceanographer at both the International Artic Research Center (IARC) at UAF and the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC); oceanography professor Axel Timmermann and climate scientist Tobias Friedrich, both at IPRC, are co-authors.

Read more about it and watch the video report in the UH System News and at The Sydney Morning Herald.