ESA Galileo ground station in South Pacific endures freak rains and flood

A 'telemetry, tracking and command' antenna, 13 m in diameter, for controlling Galileo satellites at the Galileo ground station near Nouméa, New Caledonia. 

The antenna is due to begin operations later in 2013. 

Part of a growing worldwide network, the ground station incorporates a Galileo Sensor Station that monitors the quality of navigation signals and an Uplink Station to relay navigation corrections to the satellites for rebroadcast to users. 

Credit: ESA - Fermin Alvarez Lopez

Engineers manning Galileo's South Pacific ground station on New Caledonia found themselves marooned by heavy rains and a flash flood – though the station carried on operating regardless.

Torrential rains lashed this French-administered group of islands at the start of July. The south coast of New Caledonia's main island of Grand Terre recorded more than 700 mm of rain in 24 hours – the yearly average being roughly 1100 mm.

The Galileo ground station near the capital Nouméa was caught in the deluge. Part of a growing worldwide network, it incorporates a Galileo Sensor Station that monitors the quality of navigation signals and an Uplink Station to relay navigation corrections to the satellites for rebroadcast to users.

An antenna 13 m in diameter for controlling the satellites has also been built, ready to come online later this year.

"There were three engineers on site, working on the new antenna, as the rains came," explained Fermin Alvarez Lopez, overseeing ESA's Galileo ground stations.

"Located at a remote area of New Caledonia, Nouméa is built on a flat plain surrounded by bowl-like hills, helping to screen out unwanted radio signals.

"In this instance, that meant the rain funnelled down to the site area. A stream running nearby burst its banks and the access road to the site was completely washed away.

"The engineers had to sit tight and wait for rescue: it took 40 hours for the authorities and the hosting entity TDF to fix up the roads accessing the Galileo site to allow them to come back safely to Nouméa. TDF remained on site to ensure the station remained fully operational."

"The good news is that the ground station remained working throughout, thanks to high foundations and an onsite generator."

The rains were the heaviest known on New Caledonia since 1951.

One of the remotest Galileo ground stations from Europe, Nouméa's site and equipment are maintained for ESA by French telecommunications company TDF.

Galileo's global ground network is essential to ensure the continued reliability of the time and positioning information embedded within navigation signals from orbit.

By monitoring Galileo signals from all across the world, it serves to identify service errors and promptly correct them.

NASA Image: Hudson River Flood Sept 2011

This NASA satellite image, obtained by Reuters on September 2, 2011, and taken August 31, 2011, shows the Hudson River (C) flowing into New York Harbour, filled with sediment from upriver streams and rivers affected by the rains of Hurricane Irene. 

Residents of several U.S. Northeast states approached the Labour Day holiday weekend mired in mud and stuck in the dark on Thursday nearly a week after Hurricane Irene swallowed parts of the region with flooding.

(Photo: Reuters)

Netherlands adds to UN climate report controversy

Netherlands adds to UN climate report controversy

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.

According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

The incident could cause further embarrassment for the IPCC, which recently admitted a claim in the same report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was wrong.

IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level -- 26 percent -- to the area threatened by river flooding -- 29 percent -- Vallaart said.

"They should have been clearer," Vallaart said, adding that the Dutch office for environmental planning, an IPCC partner, had exact figures.

Correcting the error had been "on the agenda several times" but had never actually happened, Vallaart said.

The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC's numbers.

The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

NASA Experimental Rocket Sparks a Flood of Alien UFO Calls

A series of spooky lights above parts of the northeastern United States Saturday sparked a flurry of phone calls to authorities and television news stations, claiming to have seen UFOs.

TV stations from New Jersey to Massachusetts heard from dozens of callers who reported that the lights appeared as a cone shape shining down from the sky, like the lights from a mothership.

However, the lights were simply the result of an experimental rocket launch by NASA from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Keith Koehler said the Black Brant XII Suborbital Sounding Rocket was launched to study the Earth's highest clouds. The light came from an artificial noctilucent cloud formed by the exhaust particles of the rocket's fourth stage about 173 miles high.

Natural noctilucent clouds, also called "polar mesospheric clouds," are "found in the upper atmosphere as spectacular displays that are most easily seen just after sunset," according to a NASA statement published earlier in September. "The clouds are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere around 50 miles altitude."

Normally, noctilucent clouds are not visible to the naked eye and can only be seen when illuminated by sunlight below the horizon. The launch took place at 7:46 p.m. Saturday, just as the sun was setting for the day.

Observation stations on the ground and in satellites will track the artificial noctilucent clouds created by the rocket for months, NASA said.

"Data collected during the experiment will provide insight into the formation, evolution, and properties of noctilucent clouds, which are typically observed naturally at high latitudes.

"In addition to the understanding of noctilucent clouds, scientists will use the experiment to validate and develop simulation models that predict the distribution of dust particles from rocket motors in the upper atmosphere," the NASA statement said