Maiken

Just found this great sailing blog by Fredrik Fransson and Håkan Larsson (listed under “links” as their blog has been inactive since their arrival) – no, not by simply randomly surfing the internet during working hours
I was browsing to the NASA’s OceanColor Web in search for information about their “.out” file type to import processed MODIS satellite imagery in a GIS (for those who care, apparently it’s just the same as HDF, or at least it works just fine with Idrisi’s HDF-Eos import tool). It’s been a long time since I last visited the OceanColor homepage, so I don’t know how long this particular topic has been online, but satellite imagery of a South Pacific volcano eruption was highlighted for general interest. A rarely seen phenomenon was mentioned in the caption: the plume of ash and pumice carried downstream at the sea surface. Already very well visible from space, and completely otherworldly when seen from a lonesome yacht in the pacific, as showed by the link to this blog. The post with the pictures ultimately received 259 comments!
However rare, this kind of experience is exactly what makes wandering the seas on a sailing yacht worth it. Seeing things that you wouldn’t if you’d stay at home or walk on the trails (or, in this case, take the crowded ferry lines from point a to point b in a fast, straight line). I’m sure there is plenty of other interesting stuff and pictures on their blog (for instance, swimming with the whales), of course I haven’t read it all yet, but I will. But for now, it is an excellent bit of publicity for those planning a sailing holiday. A bit more elaborate than my previous sailing experiences (see “unjealousing” and “blue“).

Horse manure or not – remember to publish!

At least, that’s what my professor always says, referring to the wealth of papers published by our lab in the past, as opposed to the present lack of continuity in publications, caused by certain new, rather unproductive people (ahum). So although what he said had nothing to do with my blog, I decided to have a new start here, too – I must say other people urged me to do so as well. Well, a new year, a new blogger engine, a new start, sounds good I suppose…
Actually I’ve had thoughts about reorganizing my blog by splitting it into one related to my work as a would-be marine scientist, and one related to leisure and stuff. But on second thoughts apparently I haven’t always time (or interest) to maintain one blog, let alone two, and in any case it sometimes is a thin line between work and non-work, so let me stick to this one – just don’t expect me to publish every day… On the other hand, two blogs would have been an exciting opportunity to architect open-source, global partnerships as to implement integrated paradigms. In the longer run, I could even productize global applications and incentivize next-generation interactive functionalities. (This bullshit generator really IS brilliant!)

It’s actually not only a new start for my blog, I also started writing my first international scientific paper, since I’m about to finalize the remote sensing analyses and I was getting a bit tired of the (however righteous) insinuations made by my professor.

Pauly, K. et al. (2007, hopefully) High resolution superspectral satellite imagery: a new low-cost tool to map benthic macroalgal communities? Journal of Phycology xx (x), xxxx-xxxx.

Thinking of a proper journal was actually a tough call: papers focusing on the actual use of satellite sensors to map different kinds of seaweeds can be counted using only one hand (well, that’s exactly why I did it). It is far from top-quality research: people who saw my self-made “GPS-located video transects to ground-truth the image” will acknowledge that, so I can forget every journal with an impact factor above 3. On the other hand, I still want it to have an impact factor higher than 1 and preferably higher than 2… Then considering the scope, there wasn’t much choice left. Just to give you an idea: the impact factor of Nature and Science is above 30, meaning my work is at least 10 times more irrelevant than the general news-catching science. (Moreover, if this gets accepted after all, I WILL productize my open-source, low cost applications!) The writing should take no more than two months, the review process might take up to six or more. Every single word needs to be scrutinized… And to say that I had a complete scientific paper on informatics ready-made in just about 2 seconds…

Next projects: implementing remote sensing in phylogeny (*this is not bullshit*), and a long-term study of the impacts of the fertilizer plant in Oman, provided I’ll get the monitoring contract (there’s a good chance, but in Oman nothing is sure until it is established). A few months ago, I was criticized for my ecological research in general an my remote sensing research in particular because it puts me too far away from what the rest of the group does, and when I proposed the former project I was criticized because phylogenetic research would blur the “red line” troughout my PhD thesis. So about the last remark, for once and for all: “The ecology of macroalgal communities in the Arabian Seas, including the introduction of remote sensing as a new tool in phycological research.” How about that?!

Oh, by the way, can someone remind me to bring my camera to the lab? The sunsets are magnificent lately, and I have a keen interest in photographing sunsets!

A la recherche du temps perdu

Wow… I guess my blog has never been out for so long before… A whole month has gone by, a whole month during which I couldn’t find a minute of spare time to post something, although so much has happened I’m starting to wonder how I could ever catch up. I guess I’ll start by illustrating my previous posts with some pictures and then I’ll add further stories when I get to them by association of thoughts
In short, the last two weeks in Oman have been wonderful, interesting and fun, regardless the lack of comfort and hygiene (and even of sanitary water whatsoever during the last four days), Tom’s severe viral illness which made us visit a local Baghdad-like hospital and my day of food-caused cholera and typhus (a.k.a. traveller’s sickness). The latter can be easily overcome in a nice and clean western house, but being in a village with a temporary lack of water kind of obliged me to break my 500m sprinting record eacht time to the nearest 50cm high bush in the desert, if you see what I mean. Anyway, as I said, apart from that the last two weeks have been wonderful, interesting and fun!

What has been far less fun: my Stereo-II (satellite earth observation) project proposal got turned down… Since this was the only option for me to obtain independent funding and more adequate supervisors for my preferred PhD subject, I actually can’t see what to do in the future right now… I still know what to do during the current academic year: I have to supervise an MSc dissertation and I can work on at least three publications resulting from all the previous sampling campaigns, but I can only hope time will tell what to do after that. I’ve considered lots of options, varying from working as a marine ecologist in a commercial environmental impact assessment in Oman to starting something completely different, but of course it’s a way too early to make decisions. Let’s say I’ve got about 6 months to talk to some people and to explore various alternative routes.
To be continued… next season?

Eureka!

has finally managed to get their archive right – meaning all files have names, and guess what, all files even have the correct name! So I was finally able to download the missing satellite image of my research site acquired during winter, essential to develop a seasonal study. 5 months after date, but of course better late than never, as I was already starting to fear the image was lost in the chaos of their database… So instead of presenting the Ministry of Environment in Oman and the congress in Italy some nice finished results, I’ll have to stick to a preliminary exploration and complete the study after returning from Oman… Fair enough.

While the former organization is doing their utter best to mess up cherished datasets, automated real-time end products of processed data continue to find their way to the average man-with-the-moustache on the internet. By far the coolest example, especially in these thunderstorm-forsaken days, is this lightning detection tool. As I’m writing this, 4 major thunderstorms in and around Belgium are mercilessly barraging Earth and its inhabitants. Muhahahaha Another impressive example of live statistics are the worldometers. While you read this sentence, somewhere in the world 14 people die and 7000 metric tons of anthropogenic CO2 are released into the atmosphere… And lightning has hit the Earth almost 2500 times

The sky is not the limit

My satellite remote sensing research goes hand in hand with two huge developments in geography – a very exciting coincidence. First of all, remote sensing has left the strictly geographical field, and where remote sensing studies were carried out solely by geographical experts and focused mainly on technical aspects in the past (even when the subject was strictly biological), a wealth of remote sensing studies now relies heavily on biologists (or archaeologists or whatever) for data interpretation. Secondly, remote sensing software and GIS is getting widely available and straightforward to use. One of the leading examples today is Google Earth, incorporating several GIS layers and satellite imagery of different resolutions to offer a continuously browsable digital globe. I think we’re merely starting to see the potential of such freeware.

Look at this one: where molecular-phylogenetic studies created merely trees of life in the past, potentially linked with a database of sample localities whether or not plotted separately on a 2D map, Bill Piel now developed a tool allowing to plot phylogenetic trees on a Google Earth’s 3D globe, based on uploading a simple text file linking the studied specimens with their occurrence site. Think of the possibilities this creates! Not only will it allow for visually establishing hypotheses of geographical forcing mechanisms in evolution (vicariance, etc.), but this could potentially allow to include a 4th dimension: if the tree nodes can be dated, several globe layers could be added like an onion, showing the position of continents at several evolutionary nodes, thus helping to prove biogeographic hypotheses!

I’m sending in the mob, again…

: You had submitted an abstract for the 4th Wokshop when it was still scheduled for February 2006. We would like to request again your confirmation whether this abstract is still valid for consideration for the new workshop date 19-21 September.
In order to consider your abstract for the presentation planning, please confirm until the 26th July at latest the validity of the abstract. Additionally, could you please let us know which abstract is the correct one, as we received two versions: number 260005 or number 260116 – the titles are different but the text is the same.

Me: [bolds added to make my point here]
There seems to be some misunderstanding: in e-correspondance with B.H. on May 2 I already stated my submission was still valid. She added that she would just notify the conference team to keep the submitted abstract and I shouldn’t submit a new one.
As for the ambiguity between the abstracts 260005 and 260116 as you state, I recall only submitting one abstract, and I can only find one definite file on my computer; can I review these abstracts on the internet or could you show me the difference in titles?
One more thing: I’m still lacking some datasets, acquired in March. I found imagery of one of my research sites (Sur, Gulf of Oman) in the archive, but wrongly named SE_Australia (all of the three images of this site are named like this – fairly surprising, since “SE_Australia” is nowhere mentioned in my proposal or request). I found this by browsing all images in the archive potentially matching the acquisition dates I was looking for, since some have no names at all. However, I was still not able to locate the imagery of Mirbat (Dhofar, Arabian Sea, Oman) in the archive. I tried to access the released ftp server as adviced on May 3 through e-mail with B.H. several times, but didn’t succeed to gain access. Could you advice on this please?

: We are delighted to notify you that your submission (260005 ) for the upcoming 4th workshop from 19-21 September has been accepted as poster presentation.

So no word about the two titles anymore. There’s a good thing about that: they seem to have the ability to solve problems, created by themselves, on their own after all. But still no word about the missing imagery… What did I say about answering the goddamn question before? And of course my abstract is merely accepted as a poster presentation: without the lacking image I couldn’t fill 45 minutes to talk in the plenary session anyway (although I could fill 1,5 hour talking about the problems to aquire a f***** image in the first place)!

*Weary sigh*

A quick bird’s eye

The following images are taken from Google Earth, where several QuickBird images have been combined and overlaid into jpegs. Although useless for scientific purposes, they are amazingly impressive. I’ve been at all of these places, feel free to ask for ground pictures!

The huge Sultan Qaboos Mosque between the airport and Muscat	Fertilizer plant under construction; note the intake and exhaust pipelines visible under water; do you remember the position of the violent exhaust air leak I showed a couple of months ago?	Mutrah, the fish souq and the harbor, a Royal Navy ship and the Naseem hotel – my usual base camp, the third (narrow) building under the roundabout close to the sea… And a rare cloud.
The Marine Science and Fisheries Center in Muscat and the BlueZone diving center in the marina	The Ministry of Regional Municipalities, Environment and Water Resources; a bit of a shame the parallax offset on this picture is to the left, otherwise the magnificent front wall would have been clearly visible.	Oman’s shame: Bandar Jissah resort (under construction), a 6* decadent luxury hotel complex built right on valuable coral communities at the edge of the Capital Area
Dibab Sinkhole and the new 6-lane highway connecting Muscat and Sur under construction	Eagle Bay, “Hoons Bay” and Aquarium Bay near Mirbat, under calm conditions during winter monsoon (note the bare rocks, individually recognizable)	Mirbat, with the fishing harbor in the SW corner and our hotel with the little blue swimming pool in the N of the picture; note the individually recognizable umbrellas on the terrace!
5* Al Bustan Palace hotel near Muscat, sadly covered by a hazy sky. Al Bustan means “the garden”, as you can see. A whole village was moved to build the hotel on the best beach.	The mangrove forest and beach of Quriyat, a lovely village between Muscat and Sur	Salalah, zoomed out to about 10m resolution, showing its khawrs (brackish water wetlands at the end of wadis), banana plantations (square fields) and pivot-irrigated circle fields
Sur and its magnificent tidal bay	Tawi Atair sinkhole (200m in diameter) and the nearby village of the same name, clearly visible on the arid plateau of the Dhofari mountains	Wadi Tiwi, paradise on earth with the most peaceful villages hidden in it
The former aspect of Wadi Tiwi; these days, the six-lane Muscat-Sur highway crosses the wadi over an immense bridge just south of the village	Wreck bay near Mirbat on a calm winter day with extremely clear waters	Yiti, a popular cozy week-end beach village (both for locals as for expats), just outside the Capital Area and now right next to the 6* Bandar Jissah hotel
Shana (with leaving and arriving ferries to Masirah Island), surrounded by tidal seagrass and salt plains, with a 30m resolution; note the red color of the salt, caused by halophilic bacteria. The immense tidal currents create amazing patterns in the silty substrate	high resolution zoom on Shana, surrounded by seagrasses, the road ending on the mooring jetties with the ferries (read as: miraculously floating rusty iron platforms, overly loaded with cars and trucks)	Hilf on Masirah, the other ferry terminal. Hilf has a military airbase, used for civil flights, but it is a standard western air strike base during Gulf wars
Cape Ra’s al Had (“the head of the head”), clearly dividing the Arabian Sea (on the right) and the Gulf of Oman (on top). Plans are made to convert the air strips into a true air field (while the village itself still doesn’t have its own regular fuel station).	Turtle beach resort at the bay of Ra’s al Had. We always go to the resort (upper left) to have a decent meal and then sleep under the stars on the rocky plateau with sea view just to the north – much cheaper and cozier. The turtle beach is in the NE corner.	Ra’s al Jinz, a protected turtle nesting beach with an ecological beach tourist camp. You can actually distinguish the hundreds of turtle nests on the beach (note the bumpy aspect)
	Siddah, a secluded fishermen’s village in a crevice with a sheltered bay, a village where a western visitor is the attraction of the day

2 down, 0 to go! (until next year)

Finally finished!

*Oops…Blogger.com seems to experience troubles in uploading pictures…I’ll try again tomorrow to get the colours right…*

It’s… beyond believe!

Hot topic in the science section of the news(papers) today:

Singh, R.P. et al. 2006. Anomalous increase of chlorophyll concentrations associated with earthquakes. Advances in Space Research 37 (4), 671-680 (available for a limited time only)

Recent studies have shown land, ocean, atmosphere and ionospheric anomalies prior to earthquakes. The optical and microwave sensors onboard satellites are now capable of monitoring land, ocean, atmosphere and ionosphere which provide changes associated with natural hazards. In this paper, we have analyzed remote sensing data of the ocean coasts lying near the epicenters of recent four major earthquakes (Gujarat of January 26, 2001, Andaman of September 13, 2002, Algeria of May 21, 2002 and Bam, Iran earthquake of December 26, 2003), our detailed analysis shows increase of Chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentration associated with these recent earthquakes. The increase of Chl-a concentration is due to the change in sea surface temperature (SST) associated with the changes in stress regime in the epicentral region which is responsible for modifying the in situ thermal structure of the water and enhancing the upwelling of nutrient-rich water. The increase of Chl-a concentration also shows one to one relation with the increase of surface latent heat flux (SLHF) which is found to increase significantly prior to the earthquake events. Due to cloudcover, it has not been possible to quantify the effect of the chlorophyll concentrations associated with the earthquake events for each successive day during an event. However, the limited data from the adjacent oceanic regions provide strong evidence of the increase in Chl-a concentration. The monitoring of chlorophyll concentrations with higher spatial and temporal resolutions may provide early information about impending coastal earthquakes.

Additionally, in the same thematic issue of Advances in Space Research: since chlorophyll and SST maps derived from satellite imagery are freely available on the internet, a fully automatic html based real-time earthquake monitoring and warning program is being developed with promising preliminary results. Satellites aren’t always designed to track “hidden weapons of mass destruction in the axis of evil”, you know…

Spielerei

Sometimes, life can be surprisingly simple. What I’m about to tell here might bore most of you (be warned, stop reading if you feel like it), but it doesn’t happen a lot I’m sufficiently creative to be more or less proud of (ahem :-p), so here comes: I designed and tested this formula to calculate the degree of exposure of bays to wave action (and other oceanographic influences), from problem to solution within half a day. Guess what: it seems to work! And what’s more: for once my supervisor was enthousiastic about it :-p It matches our temperature and biological field observations. Merely four internationally published references tackle the problem of conceptualizing the degree of exposure when data from unaffordably expensive loggers are absent, and only one of these attempt to do it without presuming the availability of fine-scale meteorological data. In all modesty, my method is by far the most comprehensive and straightforward, useful for both high and low resolution studies, without requiring extensive meteorological data sets (only a rough estimation of a will do). It yields a reproducible and readily interpretable index between 0 and 1 that can be compared between different sites. It allows for objective class definitions and can be used to test whether biological features in particular bays are mainly influenced by exposure or whether other factors (e.g. substrate type, human influences, …) are involved. Until I publish it somewhere next year, I invite everyone in search for this kind of indices to test it and let me know if it works with their data. And if it doesn’t… at least it looks cool!