Vox has a report on a Trump "science" adviser speculating about cutting NASA's earth science research to cut down on all that annoying global warming data being captured (echoing the Australian government's attempts to purge itself of climate scientists) - A Trump adviser wants to scale back NASA’s ability to study climate change. As the UCS says - Bad decision !.

Donald Trump isn’t just vowing to undo US climate policies as president. His transition team is also talking about curtailing NASA’s ability to study climate change. ... In the piece, it becomes clear that what Walker really dislikes is NASA’s research on global warming, which he called “heavily politicized” without any justification. (Walker, who was the Republican chair of the House science committee from 1995 to 1997, claimed that “half” the world’s climatologists doubt the human role in global warming — that’s just not true at all.)

A move like this, if it actually happened, could be a big deal. Not only would it mean serious changes to America’s ability to study global warming, but it could affect a host of other key NASA programs that provide info on everything from weather to wildfires to drought and much more. And while any change to NASA’s budget would require congressional approval, plenty of Republicans in both the House and Senate are on board with removing the agency’s earth science programs.

NASA JPL has an article on a scheme to generate tidal power using a "hydrokinetic energy system" - Turning the tide to energy.

NASA researchers who developed a new way to power robotic underwater vehicles believe a spin-off technology could help convert ocean energy into electrical energy on a much larger scale. The researchers hope that clean, renewable energy produced from the motion of the ocean and rivers could potentially meet an important part of the world's demand for electricity.

Many different methods already exist for using moving water to create power. Hydroelectric plants, for example, are among the most established and least expensive sources of electricity. They benefit from the large hydrostatic pressure difference between the water surface behind the dam and the turbines that can be harnessed to produce power. But the power that can be produced in this manner is limited, because most of the suitable rivers already have hydroelectric dams.

Other technologies have been designed -- and are being developed -- to turn the energy of ocean currents, tides, and flowing rivers into another kind of power, called hydrokinetic energy. Many of these hydrokinetic energy systems use underwater turbines, similar to those in wind farms. Ocean currents or tides turn the turbines, which generate electricity that can be transferred by cable to shore.

Jack Jones, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Yi Chao, a JPL scientist, have designed a new kind of underwater hydrokinetic energy system. It uses water motion to generate a high-pressure liquid rather than electricity. That liquid is then transported to shore and used to produce electricity on land. Caltech, which operates JPL for NASA, holds the patent on this innovative energy technology.

The JPL/Caltech hydrokinetic energy system is a spin-off from a research project to find a new way to power robotic underwater vehicles. Most robotic underwater vehicles run on batteries and have to be recovered by ship to have their batteries recharged or replaced.

In this project, initiated by Pat Beauchamp of JPL's Center for In Situ Exploration and Sample Return, Jones was asked to develop a way to use temperature differences in the ocean to power submersibles. He had previously developed thermally controlled balloons for Venus, Mars and Titan. Jones was teamed up with Chao, who uses underwater gliders in his oceanographic research. "I saw we could extend the lives of these vehicles significantly by harvesting energy from the ocean environment," Chao says.

Jones and Chao designed a system that takes advantages of changes in ocean temperature to create a high-pressure fluid that can be used to generate power. "The trick was to find a special substance known as a phase change material that changes from a solid to a liquid as the temperature in the environment changes from cold to warm," Chao says. "When the material melts, it expands, compressing a central tube in which another liquid is stored. This liquid, now under high pressure, is used to generate electricity to charge the battery underwater."

Working with colleagues from JPL and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, and funded by the Office of Naval Research, Jones and Chao are developing a prototype underwater vehicle powered by this new energy system. They will conduct field tests in the Pacific Ocean this fall.

While they were working on this project, the researchers realized that they could employ the same concept -- using an environmental pump to generate a high-pressure liquid -- to produce electricity from the world's ocean.

REw has an article on NASA's effort to map offshore wind intensity, collected at the JPL Winds site - NASA Maps Reveal Wind Energy Sources.

Efforts to harness the energy potential of Earth's ocean winds could soon gain an important new tool, global satellite maps from NASA. Scientists have been creating maps using nearly a decade of data from NASA's QuikSCAT satellite that reveal ocean areas where the wind resources exist to produce wind energy.

The new maps could help developers better plan the locations of offshore wind farms. The research was funded by NASA's Earth Science Division, which works to advance the frontiers of scientific discovery about Earth and its climate.

"Wind energy is environmentally friendly. After the initial energy investment to build and install wind turbines, you don't burn fossil fuels that emit carbon," said study lead author Tim Liu, a senior research scientist and QuikSCAT science team leader at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Like solar power, wind energy is green energy."

Science Daily has more on the same topic - Ocean Wind Power Maps Reveal Possible Wind Energy Sources.

Wind energy has the potential to provide 10 to 15 percent of future world energy requirements, according to Paul Dimotakis, chief technologist at JPL. If ocean areas with high winds were tapped for wind energy, they could potentially generate 500 to 800 watts of energy per square meter, according to Liu's research. Dimotakis notes that while this is slightly less than solar energy (which generates about one kilowatt of energy per square meter), wind power can be converted to electricity more efficiently than solar energy and at a lower cost per watt of electricity produced.

According to Liu, new technology has made floating wind farms in the open ocean possible. A number of wind farms are already in operation worldwide. Ocean wind farms have less environmental impact than onshore wind farms, whose noise tends to disturb sensitive wildlife in their immediate area. Also, winds are generally stronger over the ocean than on land because there is less friction over water to slow the winds down - there are no hills or mountains to block the wind's path.

Ideally, offshore wind farms should be located in areas where winds blow continuously at high speeds. The new research identifies such areas and offers explanations for the physical mechanisms that produce the high winds.

An example of one such high-wind mechanism is located off the coast of Northern California near Cape Mendocino. The protruding land mass of the cape deflects northerly winds along the California coast, creating a local wind jet that blows year-round. Similar jets are formed from westerly winds blowing around Tasmania, New Zealand, and Tierra del Fuego in South America, among other locations. Areas with large-scale, high wind power potential also can be found in regions of the mid-latitudes of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, where winter storms normally track.

Robert Rapier has a post on solar power potential in the US - That's a Lot of Solar Insolation.

Without a doubt, I am a big fan of solar power. I have very high hopes that thin film companies like Nanosolar will allow us all to drape our homes in cheap solar films. I spend time pondering how much solar power it would take to replace electricity usage or transportation fuel in the U.S.

But I don't think the U.S. has done nearly enough to foster solar energy. Check out this graphic from a new story in Forbes - Sue OPEC? Congress Should Sue Itself - to appreciate how much potential we have for solar power in the U.S.

Having good data about renewable energy resources will obviously help us harness them in the most optimal locations. The other benefit of having a good understanding of what is going on in the world is being able to avoid wasting resources - Technology Review has an article explaining how farmers use weather data to guide planting, tending and harvesting crops - Remote weather stations give farmers timely advice.

For apple growers like Abby Jacobson, making or losing money depends as much on what they don't do as what they do.

So when data from Michigan State University's high-tech weather monitoring network helped her decide to skip four costly chemical sprayings this spring, she considered it an unqualified success.

"I think it's really positive for our industry and it really benefits our customers," said Jacobson, who co-owns Westview Orchards, about 25 miles north of Detroit, with sister Katrina Schumacher.

Technicians installed the station in March in an open field near fruit trees at the 188-acre orchard near Romeo. The station checks wind speed and direction, air temperature, humidity, precipitation, solar radiation, leaf wetness, and soil moisture and temperature at two depths.

A modem links the station -- one of 57 statewide -- to Verizon Wireless' broadband wireless network, which feeds the data every five minutes to Michigan State's Enviro-weather computer programs.

They, in turn, crunch the numbers and give farmers up-to-the-minute advice on when to plant; apply fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides; irrigate and harvest their crops. The information is instantly available free to farmers by logging in to Enviro-weather's Web site.

Washington State University operates its own network of 109 stations, and smaller systems are growing in Florida, Georgia, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Utah.

Tech-savvy farmers are eager for the help that real-time weather data and analysis can provide them while they make decisions on pest control, disease control and water management, said Robert Krebs, operations manager for Washington State's AgWeatherNet system.

He said those who grow grapes and tree fruits find it particularly useful to know when it's safe to skip chemicals. "If you can avoid one spraying application, you've paid for that station," he said.

Wired has an article in a similar vein - Feeding the Masses: Data In, Crop Predictions Out.

Farmer's Almanac is finally obsolete. Last October, agricultural consultancy Lanworth not only correctly projected that the US Department of Agriculture had overestimated the nation's corn crop, it nailed the margin: roughly 200 million bushels. That's just 1.5 percent fewer kernels but still a significant shortfall for tight markets, causing a 13 percent price hike and jitters in the emerging ethanol industry. When the USDA downgraded expectations a month after Lanworth's prediction, the little Illinois-based company was hailed as a new oracle among soft-commodity traders — who now pay the firm more than $100,000 a year for a timely heads-up on fluctuations in wheat, corn, and soybean supplies.

The USDA bases its estimates on questionnaires and surveys — the agency calls a sample of farmers and asks what's what. Lanworth uses satellite images, digital soil maps, and weather forecasts to project harvests at the scale of individual fields. It even looks at crop conditions and rotation patterns — combining all the numbers to determine future yields.

Founded in 2000, Lanworth started by mapping forests for land managers and timber interests. Tracking trends in sleepy woodlands required just a few outer-space snapshots a year. But food crops are a fast-moving target. Now the company sorts 100 gigs of intel every day, adding to a database of 50 terabytes and counting. It's also moving into world production-prediction — wheat fields in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine are already in the data set, as are corn and soy plots in Brazil and Argentina. The firm expects to reach petabyte scale in five years. "There are questions about how big the total human food supply is and whether we as a country are exposed to risk," says Lanworth's director of information services, Nick Kouchoukos. "We're going after the global balance sheet."