Science 4 April 2008:
Vol. 320 no. 5872 pp. 57-58
DOI: 10.1126/science.1155398
Vol. 320 no. 5872 pp. 57-58
DOI: 10.1126/science.1155398
- PERSPECTIVE
Blooms Like It Hot (click here)
- Hans W. Paerl,
- Jef Huisman
- A link exists between global warming and the worldwide proliferation of harmful cyanobacterial blooms.
China? Yeah, China.
April 7, 2008
Blue-green algae in Lake Taihu, China.
Credit: Image courtesy of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
You know that green scum (click here) creeping across the surface of your local public water reservoir? Or maybe it's choking out a favorite fishing spot or livestock watering hole. It's probably cyanobacteria -- blue-green algae -- and, according to a paper in the April 4 issue of the journal Science, it relishes the weather extremes that accompany global warming....
The winds kept the bloom at the point where water is brought in for consumption.
August 1, 2014
The winds kept the bloom at the point where water is brought in for consumption.
Algae blooms (click here) have become a regular occurrence on Lake Erie in summer. But it’s not every year that a bloom leads to the shutdown of water supplies in an American or Canadian city.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured the top image, a natural-color view of an algae bloom in the west end of Lake Erie. The image of the coastal waters off of Ohio, Michigan, and southwestern Ontario was acquired at 2:50 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (1850 Universal Time) on August 3, 2014. Algae generally gives the water a milky green color.
The second image shows a closer view of the same area as observed on August 1 by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite. The OLI image includes a special blue wavelength band that allows scientists to adjust for the distortions caused by the atmosphere near the coast.
