A 1940s social club at the edge of Anza Borrego Desert State Park will become UC Irvine’s new desert research center, where scientists will investigate everything from climate change to the effects of human presence on the park’s plants and animals.

West Coast inhabitants have learned by now that we live downwind from the crippled nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan. The plume of radioactive material poses a real threat near the source, where images include health workers wearing protective "moon suits," infants probed by Geiger counters, and contaminated smoke and steam spewing from the damaged reactor buildings. These emissions are carried our direction in the global wind belt called the prevailing westerlies.

Some simulations now show traces of radiation from Japan potentially reaching across the Pacific to the U.S. West Coast by Friday, but even if it did, the radiation amounts would be so tiny that they would represent no health threat, experts say.

"Our six-day forward plume simulation shows most of it misses us," said Menas Kafatos, founding dean at Chapman's Schmid College of Science, whose research group generates wind and weather forecasts from satellite data.