This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012.

The NPP satellite was renamed 'Suomi NPP' on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

Suomi NPP is NASA's next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.

Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST Hampton VA (SPX) Feb 07, 2012 - The doors are open on NASA's Suomi NPP satellite and the newest version of the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument is scanning Earth for the first time, helping to assure continued availability of measurements of the energy leaving the Earth-atmosphere system.

The CERES results help scientists to determine the Earth's energy balance, providing a long-term record of this crucial environmental parameter that will be consistent with those of its predecessors.

CERES arrived in space Oct. 28, 2011, carried by NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite, the recently renamed Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, or Suomi NPP. Suomi NPP is the result of a partnership between NASA, NOAA and the Department of Defense.

Instrument cover-opening activities began on the instrument at 10:12 a.m. Eastern time Jan. 26, an operation that took about three hours. The "first light" process represented the transition from engineering checkout to science observations. The next morning CERES began taking Earth-viewing data, and on Jan. 29 scientists produced an image from the scans.

"It's extremely gratifying to see the CERES FM-5 instruments on Suomi NPP begin taking measurements. We're continuing the legacy of the most accurate Earth radiation budget observations ever made," said CERES project scientist Kory Priestley, of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

"It has taken an incredible team of engineers, scientists, data management and programmatic experts to get CERES to this point," he said.

NASA instruments have provided the scientific community unprecedented observations of the Earth's climate and energy balance for nearly 30 years. The first CERES instrument was launched in 1997. Before that, the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) did the job beginning in 1984.

Langley Research Center has led both the ERBE and CERES experiments and provided stewardship of these critical climate observations.

For 27 years without a break, the instruments collectively have returned a vast quantity of precise data about the solar energy reflected and absorbed by Earth, the heat the planet emits, and the role of clouds in that process.

"CERES monitors minute changes in the Earth's energy budget, the difference between incoming and outgoing energy," said CERES principal investigator Norman Loeb, of Langley Research Center.

"Any imbalance in Earth's energy budget due to increasing concentrations of heat trapping gases warms the ocean, raises sea level, and causes increases in atmospheric temperature," Loeb said. "Amassing a long record of data is important in order to understand how Earth's climate is changing in response to human activities as well as natural processes."

How It Works
In addition to observing changes in Earth's radiation budget, scientists are also monitoring changes in clouds and aerosols, which strongly influence Earth's radiation budget.

"Clouds both reflect sunlight and block energy from radiating to space," Loeb said. "Which of these two effects dominates depends upon the properties of clouds, such as their amount, thickness and height."

"As the Earth's environment evolves, cloud properties may change in ways that could amplify or offset climate change driven by other processes. Understanding the influence of clouds on the energy budget is therefore a critical climate problem."

The four other CERES instruments are in orbit on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.

Overall Mission
The five-instrument suite on Suomi NPP collects and distributes remotely sensed land, ocean, and atmospheric data to the meteorological and global Earth system science research communities. The mission will provide atmospheric and sea surface temperatures, humidity sounding, land and ocean biological productivity, cloud and aerosol properties, total/profile ozone measurements, and monitor changes in the Earth's radiation budget.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the Suomi mission for the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) program provides the satellite ground system and NOAA provides operational support. Suomi NPP commissioning activities are expected to be completed by March.

NASA Langley manages the CERES experiment with additional contracted support from Science Systems and Applications, Inc. The TRW Space and Electronics Group in Redondo Beach, Calif., now owned by Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, built all of the CERES instruments.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST Greenbelt MD (SPX) Feb 07, 2012 - The Suomi NPP satellite is in a polar orbit around Earth at an altitude of 512 miles (about 824 kilometers), but the perspective of the new Eastern hemisphere 'Blue Marble' is from 7,918 miles (about 12,743 kilometers).

NASA scientist Norman Kuring managed to 'step back' from Earth to get the big picture by combining data from six different orbits of the Suomi NPP satellite. Or putting it a different way, the satellite flew above this area of Earth six times over an eight hour time period. Norman took those six sets of data and combined them into one image.

The new image is a composite of six separate orbits taken on January 23, 2012 by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite. Both of these new 'Blue Marble' images are images taken by a new instrument flying aboard Suomi NPP, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).

Compiled by NASA Goddard scientist Norman Kuring, this image has the perspective of a viewer looking down from 7,918 miles (about 12,742 kilometers) above the Earth's surface from a viewpoint of 10 degrees South by 45 degrees East. The four vertical lines of 'haze' visible in this image shows the reflection of sunlight off the ocean, or 'glint,' that VIIRS captured as it orbited the globe. Suomi NPP is the result of a partnership between NASA, NOAA and the Department of Defense.

Using a basketball you can get a good idea of how far away the Suomi NPP satellite is from Earth. Take a basketball that has a diameter of 10 inches (about 25 centimeters) and say that's 'Earth.' (For the record, Earth has a diameter of about 7,926 miles (about 12,756 kilometers)).

So to get the same view of Earth as the VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite, hold the basketball five-eighth of an inch (about one-and-a-half centimeters) away from your face.

The actual swath width of the Earth's surface covered by each pass of VIIRS as the satellite orbits the Earth is about 1,865 miles (about 3,001 kilometers). On the basketball that's about two and one-third inches (about six centimeters).

Over its lifetime the International Space Station's altitude has been between 205 miles (about 330 kilometers) and 255 miles (410 kilometers) above the Earth's surface. That brings your 'basketball Earth' closer to your face at about five-sixteenth of an inch (about point-eight centimeters) away.

The original 'Blue Marble' image is a photograph taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts as they traveled toward the moon. It was taken at a distance of about 28,000 miles (45,062 kilometers). That puts your 'basketball Earth' at over 30 inches (76 centimeters) away from your face, or roughly an arm's length away.

The moon is about 238,857 miles (384,403 kilometers) away from the Earth's surface. That puts your 'Earth basketball' about 25 feet (about 7.6 meters) away, which is roughly the distance a three-point line on a basketball court is from the basket.

According to Flickr, that Western hemisphere Blue Marble 2012 image has more than 3.1 million views as of February 1st, making it one of the all-time most viewed images on the site after only one week.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST Mountain View, Calif. (UPI) Feb 6, 2012 - A Google Earth image with an undersea gridlike pattern some suspected were sunken streets of the mythological city of Atlantis has been updated, official said.

Google said the pattern in an image in Google Ocean, an extension of map program Google Earth, was merely the result of data artifacts from the sonar method oceanographers use to map the seafloor.

When Google uses lots of surveys from different sources together, they sometimes overlap, creating strange gridlike patterns, researchers said.

"The original version of Google Ocean was a newly developed prototype map that had high resolution but also contained thousands of blunders related to the original archived ship data," David Sandwell of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California said.

Google has updated the application with new seafloor data that no longer displays the so-called Atlantis artifact, LiveScience.com reported Sunday.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST Beijing (UPI) Feb 2, 2012 - Chinese authorities say an application by Google for an online maps license, required for operating such services in China, is under official examination.

The application was submitted in November by Beijing Guxiang Information Technology Co. Ltd, a joint venture with Google, officials said.

Under Chinese law foreign companies are banned from providing Internet mapping services in China, and foreign investors' stake in joint ventures involved in Internet mapping cannot exceed 50 percent, China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported Wednesday.

Foreign-funded Google China and local firm Ganji.com each hold a 50 percent stake in the google.cn Web site, China's National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation said in a statement.

Google's online maps service in China can operate as it has been, it said, but its service content should not be increased while its application is being studied.

A total of 279 licenses have been granted for offering online mapping services, the administration said.

"The move to bring Internet mapping services under regulation will facilitate public access to better quality online maps as well as maintain state geoinformation security," an administration official said in the statement.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST Greenbelt MD (SPX) Feb 03, 2012 - Predicting the future is always a tricky business - just watch a TV weather report. Weather forecasts have come a long way, but almost every season there's a snowstorm that seems to come out of nowhere, or one that's forecast as 'the big one' that turns out to be a total bust.

In the last ten years, scientists have shown that it is possible to detect falling snow and measure surface snowpack information from the vantage point of space. But there remains much that is unknown about the fluffy white stuff.

"We're still figuring out how to measure snow from space," says Gail Skofronick-Jackson, a specialist in the remote sensing of snow at NASA's Goddard Space Fight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "We're where we were with measuring rain 40 years ago."

Skofronick-Jackson is part of a team of scientists from NASA and Environment Canada who are running a large experiment in Southern Ontario to improve snow detection. Their GPM Cold-season Precipitation Experiment (GCPEx) supports the new Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission whose Core satellite is scheduled to launch in 2014.

GPM is an international satellite mission that will unify and set new standards for precipitation measurements from space, providing the next-generation observations of rain and snow worldwide every three hours.

As part of their snow detection efforts, the GCPEx science team is collecting as much data as they can to improve understanding of snow dynamics inside clouds, because they relate to how snow moves through Earth's water and climate cycles.

Accurate snowfall measurements are important for more than just weather forecasts. Snow is one of the primary sources of water in mountainous regions. For example, the snow pack on the Sierra Nevada Mountains accounts for one-third of the water supply for all of California.

The snowmelt that enters the water cycle in spring and summer provides both drinking water and irrigation for California's $37.5 billion dollar agricultural industry. Droughts and climate change are making the snow pack a shrinking water resource, and managers have a greater need than ever to know exactly how much water is locked in snow.

But to know that, scientists first have to know just how much water snow carries as it falls to the ground.

Rain vs. Snow
Figuring out how much water comes down as snow first requires being able to tell snow from rain. On the surface, it's obvious, rain is liquid and wet, snow is solid and frozen. But rain and snow often happen at the same time or snow can melt into rain.

To tell the difference between rain and snow from space, scientists use an instrument called a microwave radiometer. It works by measuring the microwaves that naturally radiate from Earth all the time. Different natural phenomena radiate at different frequencies. For example rain causes a response at lower frequency microwaves while falling snow affects higher frequency microwave measurements.

A radiometer, like a car radio picking up different stations, picks up responses at different frequencies and thus distinguishes between rain and snow. The signal gets stronger for heavy rain or intense snow rates.

Currently radiometers on some satellites can tell the difference between rain and snow - but only to a point. Complications occur where the frequencies respond to both liquid rain and falling snow or even to the Earth's surface, says Skofronick-Jackson. "There's a mixed response in those channels, so you kind of have to know what you're looking at."

In those overlapping frequencies, what distinguishes rain from snow is temperature, size and shape, a current unknown in most precipitation detection.

"What we know about rain is that raindrops are spherical or slightly flattened spheres. So they all basically have one shape," says Skofronick-Jackson. "With snow we have so many different shapes." Needles in a Stack of Snowflakes

Snowflakes come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Individual flakes can be long thin needles, hollow columns, or flat plates with millions of different patterns. Their fluffy shapes and sheer variety are what make measuring snow rates tricky.

"Raindrops are going to pretty much fall straight down as fairly dense liquid particles. Snowflakes wobble; they're blown by the wind. They're going to have all these different characteristics as to how they fall. And that makes a difference in what the satellite sees," says Skofronick-Jackson.

The variety of snowflake shapes also complicate estimates of how much water snow holds. A "wet" snow of fluffy flakes has more water per unit volume than "dry" snow. On the ground, the same physical volume of those types of snow contain very different amounts of water, and this water, called snowmelt, is what ultimately ends up in reservoirs, rivers and other sources of freshwater.

The GPM satellite will measure global precipitation, be it heavy tropical rain, moderate rain, light rain or snow. GPM's radar instrument, built by mission partner, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, provides essential measurements of the size of the flakes and how much water they hold. The radar works by actively sending out microwaves on two different frequencies.

When the microwave pulses encounter a raindrop or snowflake, it reflects part of both pulses back to the radar's sensors. By timing the interval between when the pulse was sent and then received the radar knows how far away the particles are in the cloud.

Add up all the particles and you get a full picture of all the rain and snow in one weather event. "It's like a CAT-scan," says Skofronick-Jackson. "You can actually see layer by layer what's in the cloud."

Atmospheric Layer Cake With Marble Swirl Frosting
The atmosphere does not lend itself to easy understanding. Temperature, humidity and winds change with altitude, creating many layers of air with different properties. The topography of land surfaces and oceans affect global weather patterns. Those conditions then combine to create both short-term weather and long-term climate. Part of resolving that picture at high latitudes is to understand snow's dynamics inside clouds.

"We know most clouds don't have just one classic snowflake shape, but what we don't know is what are the mixtures of snowflake types," says Skofronick-Jackson.

By combining the broader radiometer measurements that distinguish liquid from ice and tell how much water the clouds hold with the vertical details provided by the radar, the GPM science team may be able to see what mixture of particles are falling to the ground, or if a snowflake makes it all the way to the ground at all.

"As they're falling, snowflakes will sometimes go through warm layers and start to melt and start to look like raindrops," says Skofronick-Jackson. "So do you call that rain or do you call that snow?"

Finding that line is one of the goals of the cold-season experiment.

How Many Ways Can You Measure a Snowflake?

The GPM GCPEx field mission is currently underway just north of Toronto, Canada in Egbert, Ontario. Located near Lake Huron, the region is prone to both lake effect snow squalls and widespread snowstorms. NASA is working with Environment Canada to measure snow as many ways as possible to match snow on the ground with snow in the clouds and with simulated satellite passes measured from aircraft flying overhead.

Instruments on the ground at the Center for Atmospheric Research Experiments measure the quantity of snow, how fast it falls and how much water it holds. Radar and radiometers on the ground also get an up-close look at the snow as it falls from clouds to the surface.

Meanwhile, two research planes, the University of North Dakota's Citation and the Canadian National Research Council Convair 580, fly though the clouds measuring snowflake sizes and water content, temperature and cloud water. "They'll do spirals so you can see all the way from the top of the cloud to the bottom of the cloud," says Skofronick-Jackson.

Above the clouds at 33,000 feet, a third plane, NASA Dryden's airborne laboratory DC-8, carries NASA Goddard-developed Conical Scanning Millimeter-wave Imaging Radiometer (CoSMIR) radiometer and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory-developed Airborne Precipitation Radar-2 (APR-2). Together these two instruments simulate the instruments that the GPM satellite will carry into orbit.

The datasets will complement current measurements made by radiometers on Earth-observing satellites Aqua and Soumi NPP and the Cloud Profiling Radar on CloudSat.

"What we can do with all these measurements is learn these relationships between what the radar and the radiometer sees, what's in the cloud, and what's falling out," says Skofronick-Jackson.

The GCPEx campaign, running from January 17 through February 29, is on its way to filling in that picture.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST Beijing, China (SPX) Jan 23, 2012 - Atmospheric methane (CH4), one of the main greenhouse gases, has increased dramatically worldwide since the pre-industrial era. However, much work is needed to build on intermittent and scattered observations since the 1960s and systematic study since the 1980s.

Since 1983, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has coordinated global in-situ measurement of methane. Quantification of methane emissions still has large uncertainties, mainly because of undersampling over most regions of the globe by surface observation networks.

In particular, spatiotemporal variations of mid-upper tropospheric methane in China are not well understood, because of limited in-situ measurements.

Dr. ZHANG Xingying and his group at the National Satellite Meteorological Center of the China Meteorological Administration tackled this problem using satellite observations.

Using Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) methane data from 2003 to 2008, they revealed spatiotemporal variations of mid-upper tropospheric methane in China.

Their study shows that in the mid troposphere, a center of low CH4 concentration is located over western China, attributable to minimal industrial and agricultural activity. The lowest CH4 mixing ratio in the upper troposphere is over southern China, related to atmospheric transport from the ocean.

A seasonal cycle of methane has been discovered. One peak in summer and the other in winter over eastern, northeastern and northwestern China. Only one peak (in summer) occurs over southern and western China.

Before 2007, CH4 mixing ratio was nearly stable. The average mixing ratio during the last 6 years over major northern hemispheric countries is similar.

However, there has been a significant increase in tropospheric CH4 concentrations after 2007 in most northern hemispheric areas, with slightly larger increases over China.

Dr. ZHANG Xingying has stated that the trend of CH4 based on satellite observation is still somewhat uncertain, because of the short, 6-year dataset. More satellite data of higher quality are needed for further trend analysis.

To understand the profile of methane in China and provide data for validation of satellite products, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) measurements were made at a ground-based hyperspectral remote sensing laboratory at the National Satellite Meteorological Center.

A Bruker FTIR instrument (IFS 120 M, made in Ettlingen, Germany) with 0.008 cm-1 spectral resolution, was used for observations. Several years of data have been collected.

Implementation and promotion of this work will publicize methane spatiotemporal variations and their potential sources. In so doing, informed efforts may be mounted to reduce methane emission and resulting global climate change.

The National Satellite Meteorological Center manages satellite climate products in China. Two payloads for greenhouse gas monitoring are in development for the next satellite. One of the payloads is similar to AIRS for mid-upper tropospheric greenhouse gases.

The other is for low tropospheric greenhouse gases, and uses a near-infrared (NIR) spectrometer. Meanwhile, more in-situ measurements have been carried out in China for more detailed investigation of greenhouse gases.

Dr. XIONG Xiaozhen, an expert from NOAA, is in charge of AIRS methane product retrieval. He believes that this study is the first to use satellite data for analyzing mid-upper tropospheric methane over China, and represents important step in the study of climate change.

See the article: Xingying Zhang, Wenguang Bai, Peng Zhang, 2011, Study on three-dimensional structure of tropospheric methane over China based on satellite observations, Chinese Science Bulletin,56(31): 3321-3327

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST New York, NY (SPX) Jan 20, 2012 - The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

"We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting," said GISS Director James E. Hansen. "So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Nina influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record."

The difference between 2011 and the warmest year in the GISS record (2010) is 0.22 degrees F (0.12 C). This underscores the emphasis scientists put on the long-term trend of global temperature rise.

Because of the large natural variability of climate, scientists do not expect temperatures to rise consistently year after year. However, they do expect a continuing temperature rise over decades.

The first 11 years of the 21st century experienced notably higher temperatures compared to the middle and late 20th century, Hansen said. The only year from the 20th century in the top 10 warmest years on record is 1998.

Higher temperatures today are largely sustained by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. These gases absorb infrared radiation emitted by Earth and release that energy into the atmosphere rather than allowing it to escape to space. As their atmospheric concentration has increased, the amount of energy "trapped" by these gases has led to higher temperatures.

The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, when the GISS global temperature record begins. By 1960, the average concentration had risen to about 315 parts per million. Today it exceeds 390 parts per million and continues to rise at an accelerating pace.

The temperature analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1,000 meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperature and Antarctic research station measurements.

A publicly available computer program is used to calculate the difference between surface temperature in a given month and the average temperature for the same place during 1951 to 1980. This three-decade period functions as a baseline for the analysis.

The resulting temperature record is very close to analyses by the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

Hansen said he expects record-breaking global average temperature in the next two to three years because solar activity is on the upswing and the next El Nino will increase tropical Pacific temperatures. The warmest years on record were 2005 and 2010, in a virtual tie.

"It's always dangerous to make predictions about El Nino, but it's safe to say we'll see one in the next three years," Hansen said. "It won't take a very strong El Nino to push temperatures above 2010."

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 19, 2012 - La Nina, "the diva of drought," is peaking, increasing the odds that the Pacific Northwest will have more stormy weather this winter and spring, while the southwestern and southern United States will be dry.

Sea surface height data from NASA's Jason-1 and -2 satellites show that the milder repeat of last year's strong La Nina has recently intensified, as seen in the latest Jason-2 image of the Pacific Ocean, available here.

The image is based on the average of 10 days of data centered on Jan. 8, 2012. It depicts places where the Pacific sea surface height is higher than normal (due to warm water) as yellow and red, while places where the sea surface is lower than normal (due to cool water) are shown in blues and purples.

Green indicates near-normal conditions. The height of the sea surface over a given area is an indicator of ocean temperature and other factors that influence climate.

This is the second consecutive year that the Jason altimetric satellites have measured lower-than-normal sea surface heights in the equatorial Pacific and unusually high sea surface heights in the western Pacific.

"Conditions are ripe for a stormy, wet winter in the Pacific Northwest and a dry, relatively rainless winter in Southern California, the Southwest and the southern tier of the United States," says climatologist Bill Patzert of JPL.

"After more than a decade of mostly dry years on the Colorado River watershed and in the American Southwest, and only two normal rain years in the past six years in Southern California, low water supplies are lurking. This La Nina could deepen the drought in the already parched Southwest and could also worsen conditions that have fueled recent deadly wildfires."

NASA will continue to monitor this latest La Nina to see whether it has reached its expected winter peak or continues to strengthen. A repeat of La Nina ocean conditions from one year to the next is not uncommon: repeating La Ninas occurred most recently in 1973-74-75, 1998-99-2000 and in 2007-08-09.

Repeating La Ninas most often follow an El Nino episode and are essentially the opposite of El Nino conditions. During a La Nina episode, trade winds are stronger than normal, and the cold water that normally exists along the coast of South America extends to the central equatorial Pacific.

La Nina episodes change global weather patterns and are associated with less moisture in the air over cooler ocean waters. This results in less rain along the coasts of North and South America and along the equator, and more rain in the far Western Pacific.

The comings and goings of El Nino and La Nina are part of a long-term, evolving state of global climate, for which measurements of sea surface height are a key indicator.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST San Francisco (UPI) Jan 17, 2012 - The OpenStreetMap project, an open source mapping group competing with Google Maps, say user accounts in India linked to Google have tampered with its data.

Accounts attached to a range of Google Internet addresses in India have been maliciously vandalizing OpenStreetMap data, OSM project members said.

The allegation comes after an incident in which users behind a Google IP [Interent protocol] address in India were caught using data taken from a Kenyan online business directory called Mocality, Wired reported.

Google apologized for that incident, but on Monday an OpenStreetMap board member informed Wired users from the same IP address range in India had been vandalizing OpenStreetMap data.

"Preliminary results show users from Google IP address ranges in India deleting, moving, and abusing OSM data including subtle edits like reversing one-way streets," a blog post by OSM members reported by CNET News said.

A statement from Google said two people behind the accounts were contractors using machines on Google's network but said the contractors were "acting on their own behalf."

The contractors are "no longer working on Google projects," the statement said.

]]> Thu, 09 FEB 2012 09:06:18 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D