Author: Travis Swaim

Scott Rudlosky* recently co-authored an article in press at at Meteoritics and Planetary Science titled “Detection of meteoroid impacts by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on the GOES‐16 satellite”. The article discusses the Geostationary Lightning Mapper’s (GLM) detection of bollides, large meteors that explode in the atmosphere.  Due to the GLM’s optical sensitivity, it can detect fireballs and lightning with equal sensitivity, measuring the shape of meteor “light curves” …

Water Resources Research (WRR), one of the most impactful water research journals published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), recently accepted a study led by University of Maryland (UMD) Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOSC) PhD student, Neal Graham. The paper, titled “Water Sector Assumptions for the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways in an Integrated Modeling framework”, delves into the importance of water management in five possible global futures. Graham’s work employed the …

ESSIC / AOSC professor Raghu Murtugudde was recently quoted in a Tech2 article titled, “What Caused the Kerala Floods? Could We Have Done Anything To Prevent It?”  The piece discusses the recent heavy rainfall across India, describing the protective measures that failed to prevent the flooding.  Murtugudde is quoted on the “certain uncertainty” of climate predicting, stating that tropical systems like India’s evolve differently than systems in the United States or Europe and are …

Yesterday, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Leshner Public Engagement Fellows called upon AAAS to adopt a strong, enforceable policy to address harassment.  This message was disseminated through a public letter and social media campaign, encouraging AAAS members and the scientific community alike to sign their support.  Melissa Kenney, ESSIC / CICS-MD associate research professor and 2016-2017 Leshner Fellow was among the leads. The letter calls for a strict …

Okay, yet another hotel+restaurant has opened along Route 1. The Cambria aims to fill the price point between your Holiday Inn type place and The Hotel UMD “luxury”-type place. The College Park Grill is at street level in the Cambria. Maybe I should call it Burtons Bar and Grill #2. Different owners/general menus, but the look/vibe is pretty much the same … darkish décor, going for the upscale thing, background jazz music. What’s novel about CPG is that every …

Thursday, 16 August 2018

A team of University of Maryland (UMD) researchers co-led by Melissa Kenney and Mike Gerst from UMD’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites-Maryland, has received a $750,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to explore and improve how infrastructure operators make recovery decisions in the wake of disasters.

The three-year award is part of NSF’s Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes

Ralph Ferraro* and ESSIC / CICS-MD Scientist Nai-Yu Wang are co-authors of a recent in press article at the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.  The piece highlights the recent work of the International Precipitation Working Group (IPWG), an international forum used to address the issues and challenges of satellite-based quantitative precipitation retrievals and products. *Ralph R. Ferraro is the Chief of the NOAA/NESDIS Satellite Climate Studies Branch (collocated with …

On June 2, a severe storm threatened Rock the South, an outdoor music festival in Cullman, Alabama.  In an effort to avoid delaying or canceling the event, forecasters used technology enabled by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), a satellite-based lightning mapping instrument designed to aid storm predictions.  With the lightning imagery, they could tell that the storm would skirt the festival and the music proceeded as planned. The GLM, a device aboard the GOES-16 satellite, maps …