Newsgroups: lter.ced Path: LTERnet!daniel From: "Bruce P. Hayden" Subject: CED 2.4a Message-ID: <1993Apr29.193324.27234@lternet.washington.edu> Sender: daniel@lternet.washington.edu (Daniel Pommert) Organization: Long Term Ecological Research Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 19:02:31 GMT ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *********** *********** ********** *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * ********* * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** *********** *********** ********** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Vol.2 No.4 :::::: file name:CED2.4 :::::: May 1, 1993 ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** CED is the Climate/Ecosystem Dynamics bulletin board of the LTER network. In CED, you will find exchanges of ideas, information, data, bibliographies,literature discussions, and a place to get to experts within the LTER community. We are interested in both climate controls on ecosystems and ecosystem controls on climate. As this is an inter-disciplinary activity, we hope to provide things that you might not come across in your work at your LTER site. CED is a product of the LTER climate committee and contributions to CED for general e-mail release may be sent to either David Greenland of Andrews LTER [Greenlan@oregon.uoregon.edu] or to Bruce Hayden of the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER [bph@envsci.evsc.virginia.edu]. We expect that the scope of CED will evolve and reflect the interests of the contributors and users of this service. CED will be issued as the preparation work gets done (monthly?). Back-releases of CED may be requested from Daniel Pommert [daniel@lternet.washington.edu] by the file name given in the masthead. Daniel can also add people to the CED mailing list. Feedback on CED from LTER scientists is welcome (non-$$$$ contributions also welcome.) For example, please forward citations of climate & ecosystem publications on your site. We will keep a LTER wide bibliography on Climate/Ecosystem Dynamics that we pass on via E-mail. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** DUST-TO-DUST *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Judy Meyer (Coweeta) and John Hobbie (Arctic Tundra), forward-seat-sitters in our last-in-the-caravan van at the Jornada, CC-meeting field-trip along semi-arid dirt-roads, asked when I asked them to roll up their windows, "I guess we will find something about this dust through the van in the next CED." They were uncanny in their future telling. This issue of CED is about dust and its motor: the wind. We should be careful to note that Judy Meyer just wasn't herself. At our lunch stop she lamented the lack of trees and a stream in this otherwise nice LTER. The cement swimming pool surrounded with lovely mesquite didn't cut it with Judy. The field trip began with a dusty ride to the "high-country" of the Jornada. In the future, I will learn to pick my van driver with great care. You need to select a driver with a high top-of-the-pecking-order status. You might, otherwise, get a van driver with lots of peck marks. Then you too could end up riding in the rooster-tail of dust of a pecker-driven van. I was not the only novice oblivious to the need to know southwest van-driver sociology. Meyer and Hobbie were in the van but I was more the novice rider as I got the back bench of the four-seat dust-trap. They (Meyer and Hobbie) held control of the sluice gates that let the Valley Fever microbes in or out of the windows. I have learned that LTER locals like to talk about the diseases a visitor may get. At the VCR, we talk about Lyme disease. Niwot is fond of Glardia. The desert-pavement busters at the Jornada lay Valley Fever on you and then tell you that the problem is only serious when inhaling soil aerosols. On these cresote-bush hillsides a local [read Wesley Jarrell] told the gawking CC-field-trippers that some 2.5 inches of the desert surface had been removed or deflated by wind and perhaps by some erosion during overland flow. All this in the last 50 years. During the dust bowl days in Oklahoma, circa 1930s, the former sod-busters went to places like Oxnard, Pismo Beach and Altadena and the dust went to places like Pawtucket, Nantucket and Hicksville. Well, we need to talk about inter-ecosystem effects mediated by the winds. First, we need to consider what the dust is. Here is my list of contents: weathered fragments of local parent rock and organic detritus with nutrient contents, spores, pollen, bacteria and seeds and dust from distant ecosystems deposited in days of yore. A more formal statement of what dust is comes from Geiger's book Climate Near the Ground. Geiger says dust is "dry, rough, microscopic yet visible components of air plankton. Dust ranges in size from 1 to 50 microns and has terminal velocities between 0.1 and 200 mm/sec. The stuff falls out of the air but gets out quicker by being washed out by rainwater. The atmospheric chemistry wags would use the words dry and wet deposition. Wind blown dust is an advective linkage between ecosystems. Dry deposition of dust is very much dependent on the roughness of the landscape. On 10 April 1935, over the German village Werm, 9000 dust particles per liter were measured. Downwind of Werm, over the farmland around the village, dust averaged 4000 particles per liter and on down-wind in the forests the dust content dropped down to 1500 particles per liter. Trees catch dust. Take a run down a country dirt road. Dust from the road (plus water splashed mud) cause the hedge rows on the side of the road to grow upward while the road is cut down. Hedge rows are dust and detritus traps. Privet hedges in cities also collect dust and grow upward. Urban dust is especially lovely stuff. Eating city dirt is like eating 1940s paint chips. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** THE ROOSTER TAIL *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Just so you don't get the idea that the rooster-tail of dust is peculiar to the Jornada, I need only remind the Toolik Lake CC-trippers that the pipeline highway is a dirt road and John Hobbie was, even then, interested in the rooster tail of dust problem. He asked me how high the rooster tail gets. My answer was that it depended on the speed of the vehicle and its aerodynamic form. Those two variables determined how big the eddies of wind laden with dust would get within the rooster tail. I told John dust eddies heights were on the order of three times the length of the vehicle. Well, that is a good of rule of thumb but the stability of the atmosphere also must be factored in to the calculus of rooster-tail morphology. On days when the air is very stable, e.g. when there is an inversion present, upward motions are suppressed and the top of the rooster tail sort of flattens off. If on the other hand the air is unstable, warm at the surface with rapid cooling as you go upward, the upward motions are not suppressed and the height of the rooster tail can be quite high. In places like the Jornada, where the surface temperature can get quite high, we get supercritical, mirage-quality, lapse rates and upward motions once started can reach great heights. These are the kind of days that dust devils can get a start by a jack rabbit (see CED 1.2). ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** PLANETARY SCALE ROOSTER TAILS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Rev. J. A. Wix, of Cornwall, England, reports that on January 23, 1902 on the wash he had hung out to dry the day before, that is was "... splashed to such an extend by some yellowish 'mess' that all had to be re-washed, while the cabbages were covered with a dust resembling Peruvian guano." Rev. Wix was an obviously either very well traveled or a connoisseur of imported garden fertilizers. [source: Symons's Monthly Weather Meteorological Magazine 37:1-4. 1902]. The winds for the days before this January 23 indicate that this was North Africa falling on Cornwall. The same stuff that landed on the Beagle and Chuck Darwin reported on in his Voyages of the Beagel. At UVa, we have a graduate student [Bob Swap (1992) Tellus:44B:133-149] working on the dispersal of dust out of Africa to the Amazon where it falls with the rain and provides much needed nutrients. Neat idea. I can see the National Inquirer headlines now -- CHAD FERTILIZES AMAZONIA! The significant thing is that people are beginning to consider the actions of one ecosystem on another even at a distance! While the dust of North Africa reaches Miami and reddens everything, most of the dust falls out either over the Amazon or the Sargasso Sea. Nice places in need of nutrients. Deep sea cores off Africa indicate that the flux of the dust out of Africa is modulated with glacial and inter-glacial time scales. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** THE HUMAN ROOSTER TAILS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Roger Pielke of CSU, friend of CPR and Bonanza Creek, writes in Weatherwise [28:156-160; 1975] of an ice fall from a clear sky in Fort Pierce, Florida on 13 December 1973 a little before 1900 EST. At the time, Roger was a rising graduate student working under Joanna Simpson's direction. The ice in question fell through the roof of the Cappar family and broke a coffee cup and a wristwatch. It was the Cappar's good fortune that there was no hand near the cup or in wristwatch! But Mr. and Mrs. Cappar were littered with ice and roofing debris. Well, Pielke's ice sample was subjected to chemical analyses and it had in it NO2, NO3, NH4, O-PH4, 63 ppm Na, pH 7.17 silver, selenium, gallium, germanium and mercury. So humans are engaged in advection of stuff to distant ecosystems. A check of airport traffic revealed several possible solid-H20 bombers headed for Miami International around the time of the ice fall. Before the days of $600 toilet seats chunky stuff from planes was not all that uncommon. An earlier ice fall in the Brits district (Transvaal in South Africa) also fell from clear sky. It had the internal structure of ice and contained traces of tea, coffee and detergent. It was concluded that it came from a passenger aircraft on its way to Jan Smits Airport. The heater on the galley sink malfunctioned and the ice built up on the "garborator" and well, just fell off as a chunk rather than in the more liquid or vaporous states that one finds from time to time. You can just hear the woosh of the sink drain as it opened to the thin air outside the plane and you can imagine the sub-sonic, quasi-parabolic trajectory of the solids heading for surface ecosystems. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** THE BLUE GREEN ROOSTER TAIL *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Here goes! This one goes back to 1537 AD and Paracelsus. He was engaged in the production of his "elixir of life" when he came across a very strange-looking vegetable-mass. He called it nostoc! We all know what nostoc is. It is a filamentous blue-green algae. It is like a pearl necklace in a puffy gelatinous matrix. Paracelsus had come across a glob of the stuff. Nostoc masses get airborne and blown around. If it falls in a moist place it can grow to much larger size and there are records of miles of ground covered by the slimy goo. Icebergs in the ocean have been found "covered" by the stuff! In China they eat it and use it in their bird-nest soup. A nostoc fall from the sky in Kentucky [Sci. Amer. Suppl. 2:426. 1876] has come to be know as "Kentucky Wonder." And you thought Kentucky Wonder was a bush stringbean! This Kentucky Wonder is flesh colored and has the flavor of frog legs or spring-chicken. Domestic animals love this wondrous stuff! Not all varieties nostoc taste good. One version of the bad stuff is called Pwdre Ser. Poets love finding this Pwdre Ser.. Poets often luck-out in finding Pwdre Ser. at night and with their substantial imaginations they are off quick-as-a-flash like to reveries unmatched. Henry More (1656 AD) "That the Starres eat ... that those falling Starres, as some call them, which are found on the earth in the form of a trembling gelly, are their excrement." and Dryden (1679 AD), "When I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star I found I had been cozened with a jelly." William Summervile (1740 AD) offers the following: Swift as the Shooting Star that gilds the night With rapid transient Blaze, she runs, she flies; Sudden she stops or nor longer can endure The painful course, but drooping sinks away, And like that falling Meteor, there she lyes A Jelly cold on earth. Star Jelly or star excrement! Robert Boyle in 1744 noted that the vulgar call it star-shot. Huxley said it was not star-shot, star-crap or other stellar bodily fluids but nostoc. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** MANNA FROM HEAVEN *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Manna is believed to fallen from heaven to feed the Israelites in the Sinai during the Exodus from Egypt. In 1927, an expedition set out from Jerusalem into the Sinai to find the origin of manna. They found two sources of the sweet manna: excretions of plant-lice (Aphidae) and scale-insects (Coccidae). These and other manna producing insects live on Tamarix trees and the manna gets blown off into the winds. Chemical analyses indicate glucose, fructose and saccharose with a trace of pectin [Nature 124:1003-1004. 1929]. Wind blown manna from the tamarisks of Oman has been traced across Arabia and the Persian Gulf and into Iran. [Nature 55:440. 1897]. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** WIND: HOW FAST IS TOO FAST FOR A SHREW *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** The question could be paraphrased as, When do shrews become part of the airborne plankton we call dust? This important question was answered by P. J. Darling in his paper "The origin of the fauna of the Greater Antilles," Quart. Rev. Biology 13:274-300. Here is the answer. Given a 5-gm shrew of 10 square cm in broadside cross-section, a 25 kmh wind, which has a 0.5 g per square cm dynamic pressure, would bowl him over and over. A stronger wind, not unusual, would keep him airborne for some time. Well, the shrew should face into the wind to reduce his cross-section, reduce its (this is not a gender issue) exposure to the dynamic pressure of the wind, and so stand its ground. Or if just a bit smarter, the little fellow could dive for cover. CED readers [CED 1.2] might remember the little contribution offered on tornado transport of fish from lake to lake at North Temperate Lakes LTER. Getting life in the air is not all that hard but to understand it you need to know how the dynamic pressure increases with wind speed. It is not linear. Dynamic pressure is a bit complex. It is 0.5(1+C)(density)(velocity squared). Dynamic pressure is the sum of that normal to the object on the windy side plus the suction pressure on the downwind or backside. C is 0 for a cylinder and 1 for a horizontal plate shaped obstacle. The broadside-shrew comes closer to the horizontal plate and so there must be some suction on the downwind side that "pulls" the critter in the direction that the wind is pushing. Anyway getting living stuff airborne is a velocity squared and sucking thing. Linear thinkers wouldn't understand. I have yet to find evidence of shrews falling from the sky but did find mention of a turtle from above. [source: Nature 125:728, 1930]. The location of the turtle fall is Borina. Borina is a small town just 8 miles east of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The turtle in question was a gopher turtle. Vital statistics were 6 by 8 inches. It fell encased in ice during a hail storm. There was a tornado on the day of the turtle fall and that might explain how 747 version of aero-plankton got up to ice making altitudes in the first place. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** LTER DUST *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** David Greenland, Andrews LTER & former-Niwoter and chair of the LTER Climate Committee notes that dust, recorded at some LTER sites as dry deposition is important in nutrient cycling, soil and water geochemistry. At the NWT site M.I. Litaor [1986. The influence of aeolian dust on the bufferring capacity of alpine soils in the Front Range, Colorado. In Pielke, R.A. (ed) Proceedings of Symposium on Acid Deposition in Colorado. Colo State Univ. Pingree Park Campus. Aug 13-15, 1986. Fort Collins, Colo, Cooperative Institute for Atmospheric Sciences. p13-20] showed how alkaline dusts blowing onto the acidic parent material of the Niwor Alpine Tundra could potentially neutralize also potential increases in acid precip. At Hubbard Brook, dry deposition of Ca++ and Mg++ has declined in recent years. Declines like this have been attributed to reduction in industrial production and paving the dirt roads of America. There was a time in America when getting the farmer "out fo the mud" was electioneering magic! In my prt of Virginia, no-till agriculture is popular. Kill and plant! Keep those agriculural rooster tails in check. What happens when soil aerosols are once again in their proper place in the soils? Is the recovery form sulfates and nitrates in the air and rainwater to a pristine America more complex because of the shortage of base cations that we helped get into the air and "flux" from ecosystem to ecosystem? Dust off your old LTER dust stuff and we will try to get it into the next CED. {continued in the second mailing this month] ----------------+--------------------------------+------------------------- Bruce P. Hayden | Dept. Environmental Sciences | bph@virginia.EDU (804) 924-0545 | Clark Hall, Univ. of Virginia | bph@virginia.BITNET (804) 924-7761 | Charlottesville, VA 22903 | (804) 982-2137(fax) ----------------+--------------------------------+------------------------- -- -- Daniel Pommert Long Term Ecological Research Network Office dPommert@LTERnet.Washington.edu (206)543-1135 -or- 685-8292