Between the Poles

MEST 2009: Spatial Data, Convergence, Intelligent Models, Collaboration, Open Source Geospatial, GeoWeb, and Fusion

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the MEST conferences, is the daily wrap up where one of the organizers briefly reviews and summarizes the day's presentations.  I find the exercise very worthwhile because it gives you a chance to review and digest what you've heard during the day's proceedings.  There is also a session at the end of the conference, where the entire conference is reviewed by several of the speakers and organizers. 

By way of a little background, MEST is organized by the Bahrain Society of Engineers, so I find it more akin to the infrastructure conferences I attend than a traditional GIS conference.   Although it has commercial sponsors, it is non-denominational and this is reflected in most of the presentations.  It also tends to attract government people from many of the Gulf states, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia.

This year I was one of the panelists for the final wrap up, and I mentally did my own review which I presented as a personal precis of the conference.

Spatial Data

One of the themes that came up repeatedly was the importance of data, and especially of accurate, real-time data. Spatial data now includes not just traditional geospatial data sources but other sources such as architectural and engineering design, laser scanning, high resolution photogrammetry with multiple cameras, and ground penetrating radar.  Some of the newer technologies for acquiring spatial date were the subject of several talks including laser-scanning and LiDAR, high resolution photogrammetry, and earth observation satellites.  Dominic McPolin of the Central Planning Unit (CPU) in Bahrain and others emphasized the importance of reliable data in infrastructure planning.

Intelligent Models

Increasingly people want to do more than simply prepare maps.  They want to analyze and and simulate which requires more intelligent data.  For years utilities and telecommunications companies have maintained information about their outside facilities including location, properties such as maintenance records, and connectivity, because outage management, asset management and other utility applications require this information.  For example, outage management (OMS) is the primary user of connectivity because OMS typically needs to perform traces to identify controlling devices which may be the source of network traces and to identify customers affected by the failure of a device such as a transformer or pump. The increasing adoption of model-based design for structures such as buildings (building information modeling or BIM), roads and highways, electric power substations, nuclear power stations, hydroelectric plants, and renewable energy generation facilities, means that intelligent models are becoming available for many more types of infrastructure. Government permitting organizations are seeing the advantage of model-based design and are mandating (US GSA) or recommending (Singapore BCA) BIM to support building permit submissions.

Convergence

Another common theme is the convergence of architectural and engineering design, traditional GIS, and 3D technologies which enable what Dominic McPolin called a more holistic view of the built world.  World trends such as population growth, global climate change, and increasing complexity of our world are seen as major drivers motivating the broader interest in convergence.  Dominic McPolin emphasized that the complexity of modern economies requires a new fusion that will allow us to respond effectively to global climate change and other world challenges and predicted that because of its small size next year Bahrain will be a world leader in developing a new fusion of information and systems or conceptual business architecture that will provide a more holistic view of the national economy.

Collaboration

An important theme throughout the conference was the importance of collaboration between different disciplines such as engineering and business, different levels of government, different government ministries and agencies, and government and the private sector.  IT in many organizations is characterized by stovepipes, or islands of information, with limited communications between the different IT systems such as ERP, CRM, GIS, engineering design and others.  For example, a large utility or telecommunications firm may have thousands of applications, each running on one of ten or more operating systems, with its own proprietary database, which may be one of nine or more independent databases containing the same information.  This problem is exacerbated in government by multiple levels of government, national, state or provincial, and municipal.  In this respect small, centralized nations such as Singapore and Bahrain often have a significant advantage, because the problems associated with multiple levels of government are minimized.

Dr Al-Tamimi outlined a vendor-neutral architecture for the integration of different spatial systems within government including infrastructure, engineering, building permitting, mapping, and environmental, that is designed to be implemented in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.  A key feature of the architecture Dr Al-Tamimi is developing is that it includes the full range of spatial information from the very detailed, engineering precision, large scale to very small scale.  He said that integrating model-based design or BIM is a priority and planned as the next step. 

Ron Lake, who has developed and has been proselytizing the concept of the GeoWeb or worldwide, web-based  integration of spatial information for several years, made what I think is a key point that the GeoWeb needs to be treated as a web of systems, rather than a web of documents.  Ron, who is the founder of the GeoWeb conferences, has been a proponent for the integration of model-based design and BIM, which was a central theme of the last GeoWeb in Vancouver, as a key component of the GeoWeb.

New Software Business Models

Several of the presentations at the conference either focussed on open source geospatial software or described projects that used open source software.  Daniel Ames, from Idaho State University, gave what I suspect was an eye-opening presentation for many in the audience, outlining some of the advantages of open source software.  He referred several times to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) and very generously mentioned Autodesk's initial and continued support for the OSGEO.  Dan is the founder of  the MapWindow open source project, which has about 250 participants worldwide including 20 committers (developers with permission to contribute and modify code.) 

Innovation

Bahrain has announced that it intends to reduce CO2 emissions per capita by 60% by 2014. This will require the biggest infrastructure program (road, water, electricity) program the country has ever seen.  Dominic McPolin was unequivocal in identifying the key to achieving this aggressive goal as innovation and he made an impassioned plea to the private sector to provide the technology to enable this goal to be realized.

MEST 2009: Bahrain to Reduce CO2 Emissions Per Capita by 60% by 2014

In a very interesting presentation by Dominic McPolin of the Central Planning Office of Bahrain, he mentioned that Bahrain intends to reduce CO2 emissions per capita by 60% by 2014.  This exceeds the GHG objectives of many other countries.

China's State Council says China will reduce its carbon intensity 40 to 45 percent by the year 2020 as compared to 2005 levels.

President Obama has announced a provisional pledge to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

Canada's announced goal is 20% reduction in GHG by 2020, compared to 2006 levels.

India has announced plans to reduce India’s level of “emission intensity” by 20 to 25 percent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels.

China Surpasses US in Emissions

I've attached an interesting graph that shows that China has passed the US in emissions, no mean feat, but China has 1.3 billion people contributing compared to the US's 300 million.

UK PM Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have proposed a $10bn fund to help developing nations deal with climate change.

COP15 Copenhagen UN Climate Change Summit Dec 7-18

Suddenly there is a renewed world effort to achieve some measure of progress toward an agreement to replace the Kyoto Accord.

In preparation for the Copenhagen meeting, China's State Council says China will reduce its carbon intensity 40 to 45 percent by the year 2020 as compared to 2005 levels.

President Obama has announced that he intends to attend and is expected to make a provisional pledge to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

Canada's announced goal is 20% reduction in GHG by 2020, compared to 2006 levels, and it appears that Prime Minister Harper will attend the Copenhagen conference.

The key objective many people believe the Copenhagen agreement must include are commitments to

• prevent the earth's temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit)
• cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2050, with at least 80 percent of the reduction coming from developed nations.

With these agreements in Copenhagen, it may be possible to arrive at a final treaty by the end of 2010, at a meeting likely to take place in Mexico.

Iceland: Hydrogen as a Fuel Source for Ships

Iceland has been moving toward eliminating all use of fossil fuels by 2040.  One the important technologies that Iceland has been investing in is hydrogen.  For example, Iceland is investigating switching over to hydrogen vehicles and has signed an MOU with a number of well known international automobile manufacturers. There has been a successful hydrogen bus project with EU backing.  Another project that was carried out by Icelandic Hydrogen and has been very successful and has also had EU backing is fitting the Elding, a 125 ton  whale watching ship with a hydrogen fuel cell to run its two 50kW generators.  This project was so innovative that it was awarded an Autodesk Inventor of the Month Award.

FOSS4G: Andy Pitman on Climate Modelling, Fortran and Open Source

The final presenter that I introduced at the FOSS4G plenary session Thursday was Andy Pitman, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales and a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  

CO₂ in the Atmosphere

Profesor Pitman gave an an overview of some of the observed changes in the Earth's climate including a ten thousand year perspective on CO₂ concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere.  For ten thousand years CO₂ concentrations were in the range 260-280 ppmv, but in the last one hundred years have reached 385 ppmv.  He said categorically that the human species has become a dominant factor in determining Earth's climate.  He also said we are approaching a level of acidity in the Earth's oceans at which calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) would no longer precipitate, which will radically change sea life as we know it. (Image CO2 Science)

Climate Models

Professor Pitman then gave an overview of climate modeling, which is typically based on a grid comprised of 300km x 300km cells with 20 vertical layers in the atmosphere and 30 layers in the ocean.   These are computationally intensive calculations, requiring massively parallel petaflop (10¹⁵ floating point operations per second) or in the future exaflop (10¹⁸) computers.  (For a list of the world's fastest computers see the TOP500 list.  Currently the fastest computer is the IBM BladeCenter at Los Alamos National Lab which has 129 600 cores and has achieved 1.1 petaflops measured using the LINPACK benchmark suite.)

There are many climate models around the world, most of which are proprietary.  The exceptions are the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) led by UCAR and Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) atmospheric models (GISS ModelE, GISS AOM-GR, and GISS GCM-Model II) part of NASA in the US, which are open source.

Fortran

Most if not all climate models are written in Fortran, either Fortran77, Fortran90, or Fortran95, which might have been a surprise to many in the audience who thought that programming began with C or Pascal. (After Professor Pitman's talk I asked for a show of hands of those folks who had done Fortran programming and there were a significant number in the audience with Fortran experience including myself.)  Professor Pitman said very unhappily that he knew of no universities with computer science courses in Fortran. (Image First Fortran Programmer's Reference Manual for the IBM 704)

Open Source and Climate Models

Professor Pitman made an impassioned plea for more involvement by open source developers in climate models.  The reasons he gave are that open source software has fewer bugs and software development processes for climate models lacks the rigourous error checking and testing of  open source development.

Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Extent Reached

As I blogged previously, the extent of Arctic sea ice is one of the most accessible sources of data showing the effect of global climate change.  The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) began monitoring Arctic sea ice extents in 1978 using passive microwave satellites at a resolution of 25 km.  September 2007 was the lowest summer Arctic sea ice extent observed since NSIDC began monitoring and recording sea ice extents in 1978.

Arctic sea ice extent on September 12, 2009 was 5.10 million square km. The orange line shows the median extent for that day for 1979 to 2000. The black cross is the geographic North Pole.  The lowest extent of Arctic sea ice since 1979 was reached in 2007. The 2009 minimum is the third-lowest recorded since 1979, 580,000 square km above 2008 and 970,000 square km above the record low in 2007.

Sarkozy Proposes Household CO2 Emissions Tax

President Sarkozy of France has proposed a carbon tax, a tax on CO₂ emissions, starting January 1, 2010.  The tax will be initially €17 per tonne of carbon dioxide and will be levied on individuals and businesses for fossil fuel consumption, but will not include electricity, 80% of which in France is nuclear.  British Columbia introduced a similar tax last year, which has been criticized for penalizing rural and northern consumers who require more fuel than urban dwellers for basic necessities.  The BC carbon tax began in Summer 2008 at C$10/tonne of carbon-equivalent emissions and was to rise by C$5/year for the subsequent four years.  Greenpeace France was critical of President Sarkozy's proposal because it excludes electricity and starts at a low rate.

Solar Electricity Generation from Roads

One of the things that is so exciting about the response to global climate change is the creative ideas for energy generation that seem to be popping up all over the world.  I've blogged about a few of them (here, here, here, here, here and here) and have just come across another one, which proposes using solar roadways to generate electricity.  

The US Department of Transportation has announced the award of a grant to Solar Roadways to prototype something called a solar road panel.  Solar road panels are structurally-engineered solar panels that allow solar energy to be collected as well as driven on.  They are designed to replace asphalt (from petroleum) surfaces. Solar road panels also embed LEDs which can communicate information to drivers, such as digital lines at night, and messages such as "wildlife ahead". It is envisaged that the panels would include embedded heating elements to remove ice and snow in winter. The concept is an intelligent highway that not only uses electricity but can generate it.  The benefits are replacing petroleum-based asphalt road and parking lot surfaces and generating enough electricity, for example, to recharge electric vehicles.  It is estimated that five billion 12' by 12' solar road panels would cover the current asphalt surfaces in the US and produce three times as much power as is currently generated in the US. Thanks to Derrick Oswald for pointing me to this fascinating idea. (Image Solar Roadways)

Arctic Cooling Trend Over 2000 Years Reversed Since 1900

As I blogged about previously, the Arctic is very sensitive to climate change.  There are new estimates of Arctic temperatures over 2000 years that support a long term cooling trend in the Arctic that can be ascribed to precession, the eccentricity in the Earth's orbit, but suggest that since roughly 1900 another effect has become more important.

The Earth's orbit is very slightly elliptical, which means that the distance between the Earth and the Sun varies over the course of the year.   At the present time the Earth reaches the point in its orbit where it is closest to the Sun in early January. Conversely currently it reaches the point when it is most distant from the Sun in July. Every year these times shift 25 minutes, so the dates of the closest and furthest approach of the Earth to the Sun shift by about 1 day every 58 years. This is due to precession and the entire precession cycle takes about 21,000 years.  Over the last 7,000 years, the Earth's closest approach to the Sun has moved from September to January which has reduced the intensity of sunlight reaching the Arctic in the summer.

An article just published in the current edition of Science ("Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling", Darrell S. Kaufman et al., Science, Sep 4, 2009) used 2000 years of ice cores, tree rings, and lake sediments from 23 sites to estimate Arctic summer temperatures.  The article's conclusion is that on average, the Arctic cooled at a rate of 0.2^oC per thousand years until about 1900, since when it has warmed much more rapidly, by about 1.2^oC.  The long term cooling of the Arctic over the the 1900 years analyzed by the study has been ascribed to the effect of precession, but the more rapid temperature change since 1900 is due to something else. (Image Science)