The Boeing Co., one of Orange County’s largest employers, says it will lay off about 750 workers in Seal Beach and El Segundo “because of a downtown in its satellite assembly and integration business.”

In a statement, Boeing says, “The reductions are primarily in the area of engineering, although all skills will be affected, and will affect workers mostly in El Segundo and Seal Beach.”

Lewis Brinson, a Boeing spokesman, said this morning that the company has yet to decide exactly how many of the 750 jobs will be eliminated in Seal Beach, which currently has about 2,000 workers.

He added that the company will try to redeploy some employees to other Boeing plants, possibly including the ones in Huntington Beach, which has 5,100 employees, and Anaheim, which has 2,000. (800 of those employees will move to Huntington by the end of the year.)

Although the company will redeploy some people, the overall goal is to reduce the company’s Southern California workforce.

“Boeing expects to issue 60-day notices in May for an initial group of 100 employees, with layoffs to occur in July. Another group of employees will be notified at the end of June with redeployment occurring in July and August. Boeing is trying to redeploy many of the affected workers in California and at other sites where the company has suitable job openings.”

Seal Beach has and does house many management teams, and it has worked on many high profile satellite programs, including Future Imagery Architecture, which was canceled by the government due to massive cost overruns.

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In a surprise finding, UC Irvine researchers say that extinguishing some of California’s natural forest fires can reduce the amount of carbon that trees store, increasing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.

Suppressing such fires can change the make-up of a forest, decreasing the presence of large conifers, which absorb far more carbon than smaller trees, says a study by earth system scientist Michael Goulden and graduate student Aaron Fellows.

Local, state and federal agencies routinely extinguish wildfires. The suppression “initially prevents the release of greenhouse gases, and in this sense has a beneficial effect,” says Goulden, whose study focused on mid-elevation conifers.

“But fire suppression also allows smaller trees to grow. And many of these smaller trees are better able to live through drought and out compete larger trees. As a result, the total vegetation in some areas ultimately declines as big trees die and little ones survive.”

Goulden says this ecological chain reaction ultimately “offsets the short-term carbon gains associated with suppressing the original fire.

“I’m not saying that we should allow forest fires to burn in areas where there are houses and people, just that in some situations allowing a more natural fire cycle to run its course may allow forests to store more carbon.”

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The U.S. military will test launch an unarmed Minuteman III missile before dawn on Thursday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, 160 miles northwest of Santa Ana. If skies are clear, the rocket’s contrail will likely be visible. The launch is currently scheduled to occur during a six hour window that begins at 3 a.m. Thursday. From Orange County, rocket watchers should look to the northwest, or toward the Palos Verdes Peninsula, to pick up the contrail.

Spacearchive.info, the most authoritative website of Vandenberg launches, says, “The vehicle is scheduled to lift-off from its silo during a 03:00- 09:00 PDT launch window and send one unarmed Mk-21 reentry vehicle (warhead) on a ballistic trajectory. The impact area in southwest of Guam in a U.S. Navy test range. Glory Trip 19.”

Key parts of the rocket’s guidance system were developed at Boeing-Anaheim.

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Renowned demographer John Bongaarts of the New York-based Population Council will give a free public lecture Wednesday, May 21 at Beckman Center at UC Irvine titled, “How Long Will We Live?” Bongaarts, who is 63, answered several questions for us in advance of his talk, which begins at 7 p.m.

Q: I’ve seen many stories in the media that make it seem like people will routinely live beyond the age of 100, and that it will happen soon. Is that likely?

A: It is not likely to happen any time soon. Life expectancy will probably keep rising at a slow steady pace of about 1.5 years per decade. At that rate the US would need 146 years to reach a life expectancy of 100 because its current level is 78 years.

Q: Do you think that there’s a “biological limit” to how long people can live?

A: There is no evidence of a biological limit. Deaths rates continue to decline at all ages, (more…)

UC Irvine has become a leader in finding ways to protect the country’s most critical computer systems from attacks by hackers and other intruders, says the National Security Agency, the United State’s top guardian of information and intelligence.

NSA and the Department of Homeland Security named UCI a National Center of Academic Excellence in the burgeoning field of Information Assurance, or IA — a designation shared by only 23 institutions across the nation.

UCI earned the designation largely based on research in the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, whose scientists do IA work that can be applied to everything from producing weather reports to helping police investigate crimes to protecting bank transactions to repelling cyber attacks on military computers.

UCI’s IA experts include Xiaowei Yang, who develops counter-measures that thwart attacks by hackers on websites, to Michael Franz, who creates techniques to stop or repair damage by hackers virtually as it happens, to Alfred Kobsa, who analyzes how national and international laws affect personal privacy on computer systems.

“Having this designation makes it easier for the government and military to hire UCI students to work in Information Assurance jobs,” says Michael Goodrich, a Chancellor’s professor of computer science at UCI who led the effort to get the NSA title.

“This designation also improves the chances of UCI being awarded federal research grants in Information Assurance, since it provides independent justification that the faculty at UCI are highly qualified to do research in Information Assurance.”

The research is broad in scope. Goodrich says: “Information Assurance deals with the protection of information, from packets to printouts, and goes beyond just
protection from cyber pirates. It includes issues of privacy protection, confidentiality, as well as methods for authentication (proving our identities in digital forums) and authorization (proving our rights to digital content).

“Application areas include cyber-fraud detection and prevention in financial databases (we have a gift from Experian to study this topic, for example), allowing for confidential communications in large organizations and groups, as well as digital notions of
signatures, bank checks, contracts, and secret handshakes.”

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It’s almost over.

Forecasters say that the warm offshore winds and high pressure that produced three straight days of record-breaking heat will ease today, and temperatures will begin to moderate. Today’s highs will reach the upper 80s inland, with some spots hitting 90 or above. And the coast will be in the 70s, with a pleasant sea breeze.

Inland temperatures will still be 5-10 degrees above normal. But Orange County will experience seasonal temperatures the rest of the week, and a partial return of the marine layer that made the first part of May so cool.

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Heat records fell in Orange County for the third straight day as temperatures soared into the 90s, and inland areas will be just as warm Monday, says the National Weather Service. The heat, say forecasters, could be part of a larger pattern that will raise the danger of wildfires and increase pressure on the public to conserve water.

Fullerton, Santa Ana and Yorba Linda all recorded highs of 95 degrees Sunday, which ranged from 2 to 3 degrees above the record high for May 18. The heat hit 94 in Fullerton and 92 in Irvine.

“There’s going to be one more day of this (inland),” says Noel Isla, a weather service forecaster, pushing the county into four consecutive days of above average heat.

The federal Climate Prediction Center has said in recent weeks that temperatures in Orange County and the rest of Southern California could be above normal this summer. The CPC doesn’t say exactly how hot it will be. But any above normal heat could be damaging. The stress is already showing. The brief but intense heat waves are causing vegetation to wither fast, everywhere from the coastal mesa at Bolsa Chica to Caspers Wilderness Park inland.

The trend also means the region will finish the rainy season on June 30 with below average rainfall. John Wayne Airport has recorded four inches less than its average annual precipitation. And the previous year was even drier.

The statewide shortage of rain and snow, and regional heat waves, are reducing storage in the huge public reservoirs that provide about half of the water consumed in Orange County. The reservoirs include Oroville in Northern California, which is less than half full, and Diamond Valley Lake reservoir near Hemet, which is only 74 percent full.

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Cal State Fullerton will award an honorary doctorate today to one of its most famous graduates, astronaut Tracy Caldwell, who helped guide the expansion of the International Space Station last summer during her maiden flight aboard the space shuttle.

Caldwell, who earned a bachelor’s degree in science at CSUF in 1993, will receive the doctorate during commencement weekend, which also will feature an address by Robert Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor during the Clinton Administration.

The 38-year-old Caldwell began to dream of space travel as a young girl growing up in the California desert. She continued to think about it during her undergrad years at CSUF, and while earning a doctorate in chemistry at UC Davis. But she didn’t apply for the astronaut corps until the 1990s, and wasn’t selected for the job until 1998, while she working as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Irvine.

Caldwell made her first trip into space aboard shuttle Endeavour last August and helped guide spacewalkers as they expanded space station. She also helped inspect Endeavour for damage experienced during lift-off. CLICK HERE to read an earlier post about that mission.

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The heat wave that has sent temperatures to 100 degrees and above today in eastern Orange County, and which helped fan wildfires in Chino Hills and Pomona, will last until Sunday, says the National Weather Service. Daytime highs will rise into the low-to-mid-90s on Saturday and will be only slightly cooler on Sunday, forecasters say. Inland areas will remain unseasonably warm until Monday, when a steady onshore flow returns.

The current heatwave is being cause by a combination off warm winds off the desert, high pressure, a weak sea breeze and long periods of sunlight. The high pressure extends into Northern California and raised the temperature to 91 degrees in downtown San Francisco today. The combination of these factors led forecasters to place Orange County under a fire advisory, which means conditions are conducive for wildfires. Most of the county’s wildland areas are off-limits to the public due to the dry conditions. Since July 1, John Wayne Airport has received only 8.25 inches of rain, about four inches below normal.

CLICK HERE to check beach and surf conditions.

Sample of Friday’s highest temperatures

Sources: NWS, WeatherBonk.com, AWS WeatherBug

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There’s been a significant decline in some of the worst pollutants found in the coastal waters of Orange County and the rest of Southern California, says a major new NOAA study (read report) that largely ties the improvement to tougher environmental laws.

The U.S. Mussel Watch program, which measures scores of chemicals absorbed by mussels and oysters, says that Southern California waters still have the highest concentrations of the pesticide DDT, as well as lots of Tributyltin, a biocide contained in paints applied to boats. But the levels of both chemicals are steadily dropping. So is the presence of PCBs, a large class of industrial chemicals that can damage marine and plant life.

The findings were drawn from a nationwide study of coastal data collected from 1986 to 2005, and includes data from monitoring stations in Newport Beach and Seal Beach.

“Overall, the story is a positive one for Southern California,” says Gunnar Lauenstein, manager of the U.S. Mussel Watch program. “This is a 20 year drop that’s still going on.”

Laeuenstein’s remarks also are based on the fact that Southern California waters have smaller concentrations of such things as arsenic, a potential source of cancer, copper, which can irritate the eyes of humans, and mercury, which also can affect human health.

But the the new study does not mean that local coastal waters are becoming pristine.

“Mussel Watch is a critical piece of the puzzle in monitoring the oceans,” says Charlotte Stevenson, a staff scientist at Heal the Bay in Santa Monica. “But thousands of chemicals are being released and many of the them are not being monitored.”

James Alamillo, director of Heal the Bay’s Beach Report program, adds that “the overall concentration of some chemicals is decreasing, but there are still ‘hot spots’ in Southern California. There’s still 100 tons of DDT and 10 tons of PCBs off the Palos Verdes shelf.”

And Rick Wilson of the Surfrider Foundation says, “While some marine organisms and bottom sediments continue to be impacted by these chemicals, the focus has now shifted to non-point source pollution or urban runoff, which contributes the bulk of the human pathogens and excess nutrients to our coastal waters.”

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