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POPSGreen Roofs Offer More Than Color for the Skyline When sunshine hits a blacktop roof, it heats the building beneath it as well as the area nearby. When it hits plants on a roof, in contrast, the plants not only absorb the sunshine, but cool the air when the water in their leaves evaporates. Temperatures on buildings with green roofs are up to 30 percent lower during the daytime in the summer than they are on those with conventional roofs, which means that tenants on the floors below do not have to run their air-conditioning as much. Con Ed has teamed up with Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research to evaluate the benefits, using rooftop sensors to measure the temperature, wind and water runoff. Con Edison said it hoped to use the findings to encourage customers to install green roofs themselves. David Westman, the resource conservation coordinator at Con Edison, said, “It’s not only the right thing to do, but it can make economic sense.”
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POPSEarth From Space: A Blooming North Sea MERIS acquired this image on 7 May 2008, working in Full Resolution mode to provide a spatial resolution of 300 m. Globally, phytoplankton are a major influence on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and hence need to be modelled into calculations of future climate change. Just like land-based plants, they accumulate carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and store it in their tissues, making them potentially important carbon sinks. To support ocean carbon cycle research, ESA's GlobColour project has merged 55 terabytes of data from three state-of-the-art instruments aboard different satellites, including MERIS, MODIS aboard NASA's Aqua and SeaWiFS aboard GeoEye's Orbview-2, to produce a 10-year dataset of global ocean colour stretching from 1997 to 2007. The ocean colour datasets are freely available to the public via the GlobColour website.
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