The MiRS Science Team, composed of ESSIC/CISESS scientists Yong-Keun Lee and Christopher Grassotti, as well as NOAA STAR scientist Mark Liu, published a paper this week titled “In‐Depth Evaluation of MiRS Total Precipitable Water From NOAA‐20 ATMS Using Multiple Reference Data Sets” in Earth and Space Science. Lee was the first author of the study.
The ESSIC/CISESS Geostationary Lightning Team team, which includes Scott Rudlosky and Daile Zhang, have released a new ArcGIS Story Map via the NOAA GeoPlatform titled “Longest Lightning Flash Ever?”. This website provides stunning visualizations of a recently documented world record flash that covered a horizontal distance of 768 km (477.2 miles) on April 29, 2020. This is equivalent to the distance between New York City and Columbus, Ohio. This flash was recently certified as the longest single flash world record, as covered in an ESSIC press release.
ESSIC scientist Weston Anderson is a co-author on a new paper out in Nature Climate Change titled “Enhanced risk of concurrent regional droughts with increased ENSO variability and warming”.
A new paper by the NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) program, an initiative supported by the ESSIC-administered Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies (CISESS), shows that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) started the 2021-2022 summer season with more accumulated oceanic heat stress than ever before in the satellite record (i.e., 1985 to the present). As of December 14, 2021, NOAA CRW’s daily global 5km satellite coral bleaching heat stress products indicated that instantaneous heat stress and accumulated heat stress over the prior 12 weeks were unprecedented on the GBR.
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting was held virtually this year from January 23 to 27. Simultaneously, AMS held a number of specialized conferences and symposiums, focusing on topics including hydrology, climate variability and change, and atmospheric chemistry. ESSIC/CISESS scientists contributed a large number of talks and posters at the event. Talks included:
Santiago Gassó is one of the co-authors in the recently released science plan by the US Surface Ocean – Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS), a global and multidisciplinary research project established to provide international science coordination and capacity building. SOLAS is focused on understanding the key biogeochemical-physical interactions and feedbacks between the ocean and atmosphere that are critical elements of climate and global biogeochemical cycles.
ESSIC/CISESS Research Scientist Isaac Moradi has been elected to the University State Senate as one of the Professional-Track Faculty members. The University Senate, composed of faculty, staff, students, and administrators, is one of the largest and most influential governing bodies at the University of Maryland. As a member of the senate, Moradi will help advise the University President on campus policy matters and concerns, including education, budget, personnel, campus-community, long range plans, facilities, and faculty, staff and student affairs.
Ron Vogel, ESSIC senior faculty specialist, recently co-authored a NOAA Technical Memorandum with colleagues from NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, titled “Using Satellite-Derived Total Suspended Matter Data to Evaluate the Impacts of Tributary-Scale Oyster Restoration on Water Clarity.” In the study, the team sought to explore whether large-scale oyster restoration in the Chesapeake Bay, on the order of 100s of acres, can produce improvements in water clarity that are measurable, and whether satellites can be a tool to help measure that change.
ESSIC/CISESS Scientist Veljko Petković co-authored a study on the application of new and emerging field of BDL concepts to mitigate problems associated with the accuracy of precipitation retrievals from satellite-borne passive microwave (PMW) radiometers, which was published in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.
ESSIC/CISESS Scientist Li-Qing Jiang, who works on the Ocean Carbon Acidification Data System (OCADS) project at the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI), coordinated a massive effort by the international community to develop a best practice data standard for discrete bottle-based chemical oceanographic data. The study, co-authored by ESSIC/CISESS Scientist Alex Kozyr and esteemed scientists at over 30 institutions in 10 countries, was published on January 21st in Frontiers in Marine Science.