“In February, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) — a world leader in forecasting global weather conditions up to a few weeks out — quietly went live with the planet’s first fully operational weather forecast system powered by artificial intelligence. 

The new A.I. forecasts are, by leaps and bounds, easier, faster, and cheaper to produce than the non-A.I. variety, using 1,000 times less computational energy. And, in most cases, these A.I. forecasts, powered by machine learning, are more accurate, too. ‘Right now the machine learning model is producing better scores,’ says Peter Dueben, a model developer at ECMWF in Bonn, who helped to develop the center’s Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS). The improvement is hard to quantify, but the ECMWF says that for some weather phenomena, the AIFS is 20 percent better than its state-of-the-art physics-based models.

Andrew Charlton-Perez, a meteorologist at the University of Reading who also heads up that institution’s school of computational sciences, expects plenty more operational A.I. forecasts to follow — from both national weather agencies and companies like Google.”

From Yale Environment 360.

“The Ocean Cleanup, the international non-profit with the mission to rid the world’s oceans of plastic, today announced, at the UN Ocean Conference (UNOC), its plan to rapidly expand its work to intercept and remove ocean-bound plastic pollution.

The 30 Cities Program will scale the organization’s proven Interceptor™ solutions across 30 key cities in Asia and the Americas, aiming to eliminate up to one third of all plastic flowing from the world’s rivers into the ocean before the end of the decade.

This evolution follows five years of learning through pioneering deployments across 20 of the world’s most polluting rivers and represents a key next step in the organization’s mission and the global fight against ocean plastic pollution.”

From The Ocean Cleanup.

“Mercury (Hg) is a highly toxic metal of global concern, with its anthropogenic emissions strictly controlled by the Minamata Convention on Mercury. The effectiveness of this convention is evaluated by global atmospheric Hg monitoring among other indicators. However, it is uncertain to directly link anthropogenic Hg emissions to atmospheric Hg concentrations mainly due to legacy Hg re-emissions. Here, we reconstructed the past atmospheric Hg concentrations and isotope compositions using the annually resolved (1982–2020) leaves of Androsace tapete at Mt. Everest, Tibetan Plateau. Our reconstruction indicates that the atmospheric Hg concentrations increased from the early 1980s to 2002 (3.31 ng m–3), followed by a large (∼70%) decline until 2020 (0.90 ng m–3). The declining trend of atmospheric Hg concentrations resembles those observed at North Hemisphere background sites, particularly in Chinese rural areas.”

From American Chemical Society.

“Kemp’s ridley sea turtles might still be laying eggs in Texas, but it’s already a record-breaking season for the endangered species.

As of June 13, 383 Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nests have been found on the Texas coast. That surpasses the previous record of 353 found in 2017, though the season could last into July.”

From Corpus Christi Caller-Times.