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5 news posts in Frontiers in Remote Sensing

Environment

28 Oct 2022

Real-time space observations can now keep watch over ‘super emitter’ power plants

By Mischa Dijkstra, Frontiers science writer Bełchatόw power station in central Poland. Image credit: Pawel Brzozowski / Shutterstock.com Under the Paris Agreement, countries will need to track greenhouse gas emissions at the level of individual ‘super emitters’, such as power plants, in close-to-real time. Researchers show for the first time that this is already possible with data from existing satellites and instruments like NASA’s OCO-2 and OCO-3 (attached to the International Space Station), both designed to measure emissions at much larger spatial scales. This proof-of-principle indicates that the EU’s ‘CO2M’ pair of satellites, planned for 2025 or 2026, with a joint coverage a hundred times greater than OCO-2 and OCO-3, should be able to deliver on future needs.  Countries signed up to the 2015 Paris Agreement have committed themselves to keep the rise in average global temperature ‘well below’ 2 °C. Every five years, they are to issue so-called ‘nationally determined contributions’ (NDCs), describing their actions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to climate change impacts. Countries will thus need to track their carbon emissions, not only at a national level, but also at the scale of individual ‘super emitters’ such as power plants, megacities, refineries, and giant […]

Featured news

03 Jun 2022

Most read article of May 2022: Surprising finding shows children grow faster during the school year than summer vacation

By Colm Gorey, Frontiers Science Communications Manager Image: Shutterstock.com Each month, Frontiers shines a spotlight on some of the leading research across a wide range of topics. Here are just some of the highlights that resonated strongly with readers on our news site in the month of May. Children grow faster during school year than during summer holidays It has been long recognized that in western countries, children are more likely to become overweight or obese over the summer. Causes of this include changes in kids’ physical activity and diet over the summer period, including the summer holidays. But in a study in Frontiers in Physiology, scientists from the US show that this ‘obesogenicity’ of summers has another unexpected cause: children grow faster over the school year than over the summer. And because body mass index (BMI) is the ratio of body weight in kilograms and height in meters squared, faster vertical growth during the school leads to increased BMI during summers. “Here we show seasonality in standardized body mass index (BMIz), with children gaining height at a greater rate during the school year compared to the summer,” said Dr Jennette P Moreno, an assistant professor at the USDA/ARS Children’s […]

Featured news

18 May 2022

Method used to track ants underground could revolutionize how we measure snow depth from space

By Simona Pesce, Frontiers writer Photo of snow taken by crew of the International Space Station. Image: NASA With the help of some ants, NASA scientists have developed an innovative concept to measure exactly how deep the snow layer is covering sea ice and mountains using a lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) instrument in space. The findings, published in Frontiers in Remote Sensing, reveal this new method will have several applications and provide more accurate measurements on the evolution of snowpack as a result of the climate crisis and better monitoring of water resources globally. Ants may be the unlikely heroes when it comes to better understanding the health of our planet in the midst of a climate crisis. In a paper published to Frontiers in Remote Sensing, a team of scientists, including those from NASA, have found a way to estimate the depth of snow from orbit using ants deep underground. One member of the team is Yongxiang Hu from NASA’s Langley Research Center who drew inspiration from physics and biology to create a unique snow depth model. A previously developed model found that the average time an ant walks around inside the colony before coming back is roughly […]

Environment

20 Apr 2022

Most read articles of March 2022: Secrets of ancient leftovers revealed and endangered shark discovered in pet food

By Colm Gorey, Science Communications Manager, Frontiers Image: Shutterstock.com Each month, Frontiers shines a spotlight on some of the leading research across a wide range of topics. Here are just some of the highlights that resonated strongly with readers on our news site in the month of March. Leftovers in prehistoric pots let scientists peek into the kitchen of an ancient civilization How do you reconstruct the cookery of people who lived thousands of years ago? Bones and plant remains can tell us what kind of ingredients were available. But to reconstruct how ingredients were combined and cooked, scientists need to study ancient cooking vessels. “Fatty molecules and microscopic remains from plants such as starch grains and phytoliths – silica structures deposited in many plant tissues – get embedded into vessels and can survive over long periods,” said Dr Akshyeta Suryanarayan, a researcher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and co-author on a recent study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. In their study, Suryanarayan and co-authors analyzed such ‘leftovers’ in Copper and Bronze Age vessels – including pots, vases, goblets, jars, and platters – from today’s Gujarat, India. “Our study is the first to combine starch grain […]