Author: Travis Swaim

Researcher: Charon Birkett Grant Sponsor: NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center Amount: $230,545 in additional funding, bringing the total award to $393,962 Grant Study: “The Global Reservoir and Lake Monitor Expansion and Enhancement of Water Height Products”   Researcher: Charon Birkett Grant Sponsor: NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center Amount: $120,279 in additional funding, bringing the total award to $251,934 Grant Study: “Multiple Radar Altimetry Data Sets to Serve Inland Water …

As a newly appointed member of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research’s board of trustees, ESSIC director Antonio Busalacchi will begin his term at the consortium in February. UCAR, which was founded in the late 1950s, now brings together experts from more than 100 member universities and colleges, all of which offer degrees in the atmospheric or climate sciences. While UCAR provides support for its member universities, its overall aim is to advance the field of atmospheric …

ESSIC Research Associate Anand Ramanathan was featured in the “NextGenVoices” section of the 03-Jan-2014 (Vol. 343 no. 6166) issue of Science.  His short piece on the laser was in reply to the question: “What recent discovery in your field will still be remembered 200 years from now and why?”…

Assistant Research Professor Melissa Kenney is working with the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) on the Ecosystem Services and Adaptation Project (ESAP).  This activity will explore the use of an ecosystem services framework for planning and implementing adaptation, which includes identifying biophysical production processes and metrics and valuation of ecosystem services. The project will begin at the NCSE conference in January and continue throughout 2014.  (Kenney …

ESSIC Visiting Associate Research Scientist Huan Meng has received a NOAA Bronze Medal for the development and implementation of NOAA’s first satellite-based operational snowfall rate product.   Meng is a physical scientist with the NOAA/NESDIS Satellite Climate Studies Branch co-located within the ESSIC Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellite (CICS-MD).  The Bronze Medal is the highest honor award that can be granted by the Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. …

ESSIC / AOSC Professor Raghu Murtugudde recently served on the Research Advisory Council of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology  in Pune, India, January 15-17, 2014….

ESSIC Director and ConE Chair Professor Antonio Busalacchi is featured in a soon to be released article in Science News entitled “Grape Expectations.  The article addresses Busalacchi’s on-going study regarding climate change and its impact on the world’s wine-growing regions.  The article will be in-press in early February 2014, but an online version is currently available on the Science News web-site….

As part of ESSIC’s end-of-year holiday party, the Center continued the annual tradition of recognizing the accomplishments of it’s own faculty and staff, with two peer-based award for “Best Scientific Research Paper” and “Staff Employee of the Year.” The award for best paper was split between Research Associate Viviana Maggioni and Associate Research Scientist Hongbin Yu. Maggioni’s paper entitled, “Investigating the Applicability of Error Correction Ensembles of Satellite Rainfall Products …

Two years ago, ESSIC research associate professor Maria Tzortziou spent two weeks on a ship in the Chesapeake Bay, conducting research as part of a NASA scientific field campaign that would set the foundation for a future NASA satellite mission to study coastal ecosystem processes from geostationary satellites. This September, Tzortziou, along with 14 other scientists from NASA, NOAA and a number of U.S. universities, traveled to the Gulf of Mexico to conduct a similar mission on a larger …