Posts tagged fire
CU study: Spruce beetle infestation in N. Colo. tied to drought
Oct 10th
The new study is important because it shows that drought is a better predictor of spruce beetle outbreaks in northern Colorado than temperature alone, said lead study author Sarah Hart, a CU-Boulder doctoral student in geography. Drought conditions appear to decrease host tree defenses against spruce beetles, which attack the inner layers of bark, feeding and breeding in the phloem, a soft inner bark tissue, which impedes tree growth and eventually kills vast swaths of forest.
Spruce beetles, like their close relatives, mountain pine beetles, are attacking large areas of coniferous forests across the West. While the mountain pine beetle outbreak in the Southern Rocky Mountains is the best known and appears to be the worst in the historical record, the lesser known spruce beetle infestation has the potential to be equally or even more devastating in Colorado, said Hart, lead author on the new study.
“It was interesting that drought was a better predictor for spruce beetle outbreaks than temperature,” said Hart of the geography department. “The study suggests that spruce beetle outbreaks occur when warm and dry conditions cause stress in the host trees.”
A paper on the subject was published online in the journal Ecology. Co-authors include CU-Boulder geography Professor Thomas Veblen; former CU-Boulder graduate student Karen Eisenhart, now at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania; and former CU-Boulder students Daniel Jarvis and Dominik Kulakowski, now at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. The National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society funded the study.
The new study also puts to rest false claims that fire suppression in the West is the trigger for spruce beetle outbreaks, said Veblen.
Spruce beetles range from Alaska to Arizona and live in forests of Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir trees in Colorado. The CU-Boulder study area included sites in the White River, Routt, Arapaho, Roosevelt and Grand Mesa national forests as well as in Rocky Mountain National Park.
The CU-Boulder team assembled a long-term record of spruce beetle outbreaks from the northern Front Range to the Grand Mesa in western Colorado using a combination of historical documents and tree ring data from 1650 to 2011. Broad-scale outbreaks were charted by the team from 1843-1860, 1882-1889, 1931-1957 and 2004 to 2010.
The researchers used a variety of statistical methods to tease out causes for variations in the dataset at 18 sites in Colorado. “The extent to which we could distinguish between the warming signals and the drought signals was surprising,” said Veblen. “These are two things that easily can get mixed together in most tree ring analyses.”
There are several lines of evidence that drought is the main driver of the spruce beetle outbreak. The new study showed when northwest Colorado was in a warm, wet climate period from 1976 to 1998, for example, both spruce beetle reproduction and tree defenses like “pitching” beetles out of tree interiors with resin were likely high. But during that period of warming, outbreak was minimal.
The strongest climate correlation to spruce beetle outbreaks was above average annual values for the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, or AMO, a long-term phenomenon that changes sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. Believed to shift from cool to warm phases roughly every 60 years, positive AMO conditions are linked to warmer and drier conditions over much of North America, including the West.
Veblen said the AMO shifted from its cool to warm phase in the 1990s, meaning the climate phenomenon could be contributing to drought conditions in the West into the middle of this century. A 2006 tree-ring study involving Veblen, his former student, Thomas Kitzberger and researchers from several other institutions concluded that the warm phase of AMO also was correlated to increased wildfires in the West.
In addition to AMO, the researchers looked at two other ocean-atmosphere oscillations — the El Nino Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — as well as past temperatures, precipitation and aridity to better understand the spruce beetle outbreaks. The team found that another effective predictor of drought conditions was summer “vapor pressure deficit,” a measurement of atmospheric dryness, said Veblen.
In the new study, the researchers were particularly interested in “radial growth” rates of tree rings from sub-canopy trees of various species in the study areas that thrived following outbreaks. One hallmark of spruce beetle outbreaks is that slow radial growth rates in such areas are followed by extremely rapid radial growth rates, an indication smaller trees flourish in the absence of the larger spruce trees because of decreased competition for water and increased opportunities for photosynthesis, said Hart.
The area of high-elevation forests affected by spruce beetles is growing in the West, Hart said. “In 2012, U.S. Forest Service surveys indicated that more area was under attack by spruce beetles than mountain pine beetles in the Southern Rocky Mountains, which includes southern Wyoming, Colorado and northern New Mexico,” she said. “The drought conditions that promote spruce beetle outbreak are expected to continue.”
One big concern about spruce beetle outbreaks is their effects on headwater streams that are important for water resources, said Veblen. “In the short term, trees killed by spruce beetles will lead to less water use by trees and more water discharge into streams. But in the long term, the absence of the trees killed by beetles may lead to less persistence of snow and earlier runoff.”
Veblen said it might seem counterintuitive to some that spruce-fir subalpine forests in Colorado are larger by area than lodgepole/ponderosa pine forests. “It is probably because spruce and subalpine forests are found in more remote areas not as visible to most people,” he said. “But potentially, the current spruce beetle outbreak could affect a larger area than the mountain pine beetle outbreak.”
The study had its beginnings in 1986, when Veblen and his students began compiling spruce and subalpine fir tree rings from various study sites in the Colorado mountains. Tree rings from individual trees — which carry information about weather, climate and even events like volcanic eruptions — can be matched up and read with rings from other trees, much like the pages of a book, from year to year and even from season to season.
-CU-
Boulder police: Arson suspect sought
Oct 3rd
Fire was at Ideal Market
Boulder police are looking for a male suspected of starting a fire at Ideal Market, 1275 Alpine Avenue on the evening of Saturday, August 31, 2013. The incident occurred at 10:42 p.m.
The fire started when a display of charcoal was ignited in front of the store. When police arrived, store employees had extinguished the fire with a garden hose. Boulder Fire Rescue also responded and watered down the remaining debris to make sure the fire was completely out. No one was injured.
Security footage from the scene revealed a white male with a scruffy beard, brown hair, between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. He was wearing a red T-shirt with white lettering on the front and back, blue jeans and white tennis shoes. Photos are attached. The case number is 13-11707.
Anyone with information may contact Detective Kara Wills at 303-441-3482. Those who have information but wish to remain anonymous may contact the Northern Colorado Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477) or 1-800-444-3776. Tips can also be submitted through the Crime Stoppers website at www.crimeshurt.com. Those submitting tips through Crime Stoppers that lead to the arrest and filing of charges on a suspect(s) may be eligible for a cash reward of up to $1,000 from Crime Stoppers. Ideal Market is also offering a $1,000 reward to anyone providing information that leads to the identity and arrest of the suspect.
— CITY–
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CU scientists: New battery extends range and safety of electric-powered vehicles
Sep 22nd
A cutting-edge battery technology developed at the University of Colorado Boulder that could allow tomorrow’s electric vehicles to travel twice as far on a charge is now closer to becoming a commercial reality.
CU’s Technology Transfer Office has completed an agreement with Solid Power LLC—a CU-Boulder spinoff company founded by Se-Hee Lee and Conrad Stoldt, both associate professors of mechanical engineering—for the development and commercialization of an innovative solid-state rechargeable battery. Solid Power also was recently awarded a $3.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy for the purpose of creating a battery that can improve electric vehicle driving range.
The rechargeable batteries that are standard in today’s electric vehicles—as well as in a host of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops—are lithium-ion batteries, which generate electricity when lithium ions move back and forth between electrodes in a liquid electrolyte solution.
Engineers and chemists have long known that using lithium metal as the anode in a rechargeable battery—as opposed to the conventional carbon materials that are used as the anode in conventional lithium-ion batteries—can dramatically increase its energy density. But using lithium metal, a highly reactive solid, in conjunction with a liquid electrolyte is extremely hazardous because it increases the chance of a thermal runaway reaction that can result in a fire or an explosion.
Today’s lithium-ion batteries require a bulky amount of devices to protect and cool the batteries. A fire onboard a Boeing Dreamliner in January that temporarily grounded the new class of plane was linked to its onboard lithium-ion battery.
Lee and Stoldt solved the safety concerns around using lithium metal by eliminating the liquid electrolyte. Instead, the pair built an entirely solid-state battery that uses a ceramic electrolyte to separate the lithium metal anode from the cathode. Because the solid-state battery is far safer, it requires less protective packaging, which in turn could reduce the weight of the battery system in electric vehicles and help extend their range.
Research into the development of solid-state batteries has gone on for a couple of decades, but it has been difficult to create a solid electrolyte that allowed the ions to pass through it as easily as a liquid electrolyte.
“The problem has always been that solid electrolytes had very poor performance making their use in rechargeable batteries impractical,” Stoldt said. “However, the last decade has seen a resurgence in the development of new solid electrolytes with ionic conductivities that rival their liquid counterparts.”
The critical innovation added by Lee and Stoldt that allows their solid-state lithium battery to out-perform standard lithium-ion batteries is the construction of the cathode, the part of the battery that attracts the positively charged lithium ions once they’re discharged from the lithium metal. Instead of using a solid mass of material, Lee and Stoldt created a “composite cathode,” essentially small particles of cathode material held together with solid electrolyte and infused with an additive that increases its electrical conductivity. This configuration allows ions and electrons to move more easily within the cathode.
“The real innovation is an all-solid composite cathode that is based upon an iron-sulfur chemistry that we developed at CU,” Stoldt said. “This new, low-cost chemistry has a capacity that’s nearly 10 times greater than state-of-the-art cathodes.”
Last year, Lee and Stoldt partnered with Douglas Campbell, a small-business and early-stage product development veteran, to spin out Solid Power.
“We’re very excited about the opportunity to achieve commercial success for the all solid-state rechargeable battery,” said Campbell, Solid Power’s president. “We’re actively engaging industrial commercial partners to assist in commercialization and expect to have prototype products ready for in-field testing within 18 to 24 months.” Important to the early success of the company has been its incubation within CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science’s applied energy storage research center, a part of the college’s energy systems and environmental sustainability initiative.
Solid Power is a member of Rocky Mountain Innosphere, a nonprofit technology incubator headquartered in Fort Collins, Colo., with a mission to accelerate the development and success of high-impact scientific and technology startup companies.
“We’re very excited to be working with Solid Power’s team to get them to the next level,” said Mike Freeman, Innosphere’s CEO. “This is a big deal to Colorado’s clean-tech space. Solid Power’s batteries will have a huge impact in the EV market, and they have a potential $20 billion market for their technology.”
Learn more about Solid Power at http://www.solidpowerbattery.com.
-CU-