Author: Travis Swaim

ESSIC interim director and Professor Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm was recently featured in the Maryland Merrill School of Journalism publication Stories Beneath the Shell (SBS).  The article was based on a recent Department of Atmospheric Sciences seminar Miralles-Wilhelm presented about his work in mapping water availability for Cape Town, South Africa.  His talk also focused on the importance of sustainable planning to avoid water crisis.  Since its launch, more than three …

ESSIC senior faculty specialist Chunhui Pan is part of a team testing the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) on the JPSS-1/NOAA-20 satellite.  Pan recently published two articles about the OMPS aboard the Suomi NPP satellite. The first was in the October issue of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, and the second was in the December issue of Earth and Space Science….

ESSIC associate research professor Melissa Kenney co-authored an article about ecological publishing in the February 2018 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The article posits that ecological prediction models are not progressing fast enough to meet the needs of policymakers who require this information to make critical decisions. The authors note that most of the existing models have a 100-year time resolution and this prevents sufficient validation by …

ESSIC associate research scientist Sinéad Farrell was featured on NBC’s TODAY in a segment about unusually high temperatures in the arctic. Farrell discussed the formation of a hole the size of Vermont and New Hampshire in Greenland’s ice due to the heat and also noted that some models predict open arctic waters during future summers. View the video here….

ESSIC post-doctoral associate Brian Beck and Sarah O’Connor of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) traveled to Guam in late January to improve local involvement with the NOAA Coral Reef Information System (CoRIS). They conducted a data management workshop for local coral reef stakeholders where they provided overviews of CoRIS and NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP) as well as a detailed explanation of how to submit data to NCEI. There were 19 …

ESSIC research professor Hugo Berbery has an article in press at the International Journal of Climatology.  The study investigated the ability of a selection of global climate models (GCMs) of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) to simulate the mean climate and variability in a site in South America. They tested temperature and precipitation variables for northeastern Argentina, a region that exhibits frequent extreme events….