Year: 2015

ESSIC / AOSC Professors Ross Salawitch and Raghu Murtugudde were members of two unrelated teams selected as recipients of the University of Maryland’s Council on the Environment (ConE) Seed Grant awards.  The seed grant program is envisioned as a means to stimulate new UMD interdisciplinary collaboration, and solidify and enhance existing collaborations among researchers from multiple Schools or Colleges.  The two competitive awards of $90,000 each, sponsor research for a …

Raghu Murtugudde (ESSIC / AOSC) was featured in a July Livescience post entitled, “Dust Clouds the Future of the South Asian Monsoon.”  The post discusses a recent Murtugudde Nature Communications publication regarding how pollution and dust particles blanketing that region are responsible for a 20-percent decline in South Asian monsoon rainfall over the past century.  Murtugudde was also quoted in a recent article in WIRED regarding the history of inaccuracies in …

ESSIC Director and UCAR Trustee Professor Antonio Busalacchi–representing the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)–met with Vladimir Šucha, Director-General of the European Commission (EC) Joint Research Centre (JRC) to sign a new research arrangement that aims to identify and develop new approaches in the field of atmospheric and climate change research and related sciences.  The new agreement between the JRC and UCAR will focus on climate prediction, …

ESSIC / AOSC Professor Zhanqing Li was part of a recent study which ties air pollution to catastrophic floods in China during 2013.  The study concludes that aerosols trapped in the mountains northwest of the Sichuan Basin in China, warmed the air and suppressed convection, allowing excess moisture to build up and condense into rain as it rose up over the mountains.  By setting the modelled emissions at a level similar to that before China's economic boom, the team found that …

Raghu Murtugudde (ESSIC/AOSC) was a co-author on the study "Climate Change, Extreme Events and Increased Risk of Salmonellosis: Evidence for Coastal Vulnerability,” published in the journal Environment International. The paper, co-authored with colleagues from UMD’s School of Public Health and the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, shows that extreme heat and precipitation events are associated with increased risk of salmonella infections. Because severe …

ESSIC Assistant Research Scientist Hongbin Yu’s recent publication on the fertilizing role of African dust in the Amazon rainforest was highlighted in the June 2015 Research Spotlight article of EOS Earth and Space Science News.  …

ESSIC researcher Stephanie Schollaert Uz, lead architect of ESSIC/CICS-MD “ClimateBits” multimedia project, recently traveled to Colorado as an invited speaker at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Space Foundation in Colorado Springs, and the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder. She delivered five Science On a Sphere presentations on Earth System science and the developing El Nino to the general public and the museum docents….

ESSIC Assistant Research Scientist Isaac Moradi was appointed as associate editor of the Atmospheric Measurement Techniques (AMT) journal.  AMT, the leading open-access journal of the European Geoscience Union, is dedicated to the publication and discussion of advances in remote sensing, as well as in situ and laboratory measurement techniques for the constituents and properties of the Earth's atmosphere.   Further information is available …