Vol.17 No.1- March 2009

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Water & Atmosphere is getting a make-over This is the last issue of Water & Atmosphere in its current form. We’re planning a magazine with broader scope, with features by leading scientists and science journalists. We’ll cover policy-relevant science on the pressing environmental issues facing New Zealand and the world. We’ll take you on voyages of discovery from the bottom of the sea to the top of the atmosphere.

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Rob Merrilees measuring visual water clarity in the Motueka River at the Gorge – about 13 m visibility on this occasion. (Photo: Rob Davies-Colley)
Because the Waihou River at Te Aroha was in flood, Marg Bellingham took the safer option of measuring clarity using a sample contained in a trough. (Photo: Rob Davies-Colley)
Graham Bryers analyses samples at NIWA’s Water Quality Laboratory in Hamilton.

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Dr Wayne Mapp, Minister of Research, Science and Technology, at the opening of the symposium. (Photo: Peter Marriott)
Corals rise from the deep: Fourth International Deepsea Coral Symposium The world’s premier conference on the science and management of deepsea corals and coral ecosystems drew about 200 scientists, resource managers, students, and policy-makers from 29 countries to Wellington in December. For four days they discussed the critical factors for researching and conserving deepsea corals.

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Visiting scientists Improving global climate models In December, Dr Markus Rex from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany, visited NIWA in Lauder for two weeks. He was there to work with Greg Bodeker, Petra Huck, and Stefanie Kremser on a new method for incorporating polar stratospheric chemistry into global climate models. While the importance of including stratospheric chemistry in these models has long been recognised, the computational cost of doing so has been prohibitively high.

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Kina at a translocation site at the conclusion of the trial. (Photo: Phil James)
Even kina enjoy a change of scenery: translocating kina to enhance roe Kina (sea urchin) translocation is a new means of enhancing the roe and increasing the yield from wild kina, particularly from animals found in barrens where the density of kina is very high and the available feed is very low. Fishers and researchers figure the quality of a kina based on its GI, or gonad index.

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Manaia Harbour on the west coast of the Coromandel Peninsula.