Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Imagine using five liters of seawater per day to power an average-sized home or an electric car for a whole day? The research team at UOW’s Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) have developed a light-assisted catalyst that requires less energy input to activate water oxidation, which is the first step in splitting water to produce hydrogen fuel.

According to Science Alert Blog, The research team at UOW’s Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) already came up of a way to split the hydrogen from sea water. The research team, led by Dr Jun Chen and Professor Gerry Swiegers, have produced an artificial chlorophyll on a conductive plastic film that acts as a catalyst to begin splitting water.

If they are to produce something that can make the process of splitting water more, efficient, more faster and more effective we could find ourselves a…

(Image source: GOES/NOAA)

Today, a very muscular blocking high pressure system located over the Western US flexed. After having set off record fires and heat waves it reached deep into the Arctic and drew moisture and more unstable air down from over Hudson Bay across the Rockies and over top of Arizona and New Mexico, igniting powerful thunderstorms which blanketed large areas in hail, heavy rainfall and lightning. A second moisture stream drawn into the high’s circulation from the Pacific also fed these storms.

You can see the bright, high, cold cloud tops now firing over Arizona and New Mexico.

To the east, an upper level low pressure system is just now starting to draw this concentrated moisture into two other feeding, damp air flows. The largest draws straight up from the Caribbean over Florida and then rushes up the US East Coast. The second, pulls moisture from tropical…

The advent of satellite imagery opened our eyes to many unseen aspects of the airflow in the atmosphere which had been invisible to most scientific instruments. It gave us the possibility to trace the transportation of moisture from tropical regions to the higher latitudes. Further, we could integrate the amount of the water vapour throughout the depth of the troposphere (lowest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere) everywhere, especially over the oceans. The latter approach proved to be an invaluable tool to discover a weather phenomenon called “atmospheric river”.