Category: Archive

Welcome to Climate Today, an occasional column/blog/discussion intended to entertain, illuminate and sometimes provoke visitors to this site.  This initial effort is meant to provide some of the background and context to posts that will follow, hopefully on something like a weekly schedule.

When Mark Baith, who leads the team responsible for the re-design of the ESSIC website asked me to do this a number of months ago, I reacted as I do to most such appealing but of the distant future (more

ESSIC Content Management System (site version #: ESSIC, v1.0) will be released to the general public on Monday, March 5, 2012.  The site delivery represents many months of development and is a stark contrast from the technologies formerly associated with the Center’s web-site.  A brief video tutorial on basic site login and menu navigation procedures (including access and use of the “My Profile” tool for registered users) can be viewed below….

COLLEGE PARK, Md. ­– In January, ESSIC’s Wilfrid Schroeder processed the first satellite images of fire produced as a part of NASA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) and Earth Observing System (EOS). The images were acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), an instrument attached to the NPP spacecraft launched in October 2011. The VIIRS is one of five key instruments on the spacecraft that measure atmospheric and sea surface temperatures, …

Last November, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center ran a routine “Sanity Check,” checking the progress of model forecasts for sea surface temperature (SST) conditions associated with El Niño and La Niña events in the tropical Pacific. In a widely circulated e-mail, Dr. Martin Hoerling of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory brought to attention the failed forecast of Niño 3.4 SST from the June initial condition, particularly in depicting what’s called a “double dip evolution” …

Bottom line: Good grab’n’go mostly Venezuelan food place … I’ll give it a second try sometime. Have mixed feelings about this place right now. Didn’t care for the owner/cook’s dismissive attitude but maybe he was preoccupied or is a jerk by nature, I don’t know. That being said, it’s a cute little cafe and I liked the arepas he slapped together (never had them before … like them – would try something more exciting than the Venezuelan cheese filling I ordered, though, but they were out of …

By: Sinead L. Farrell

March 2012 sees us busily preparing for our annual spring aircraft deployment to the Arctic, to re-survey key parts of the polar regions. NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission is an airborne survey dedicated to measuring the thickness of sea ice in the Arctic and Southern Oceans, as well as the ice mass-balance of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The IceBridge Mission bridges the gap between the ICESat satellite, which concluded its operations in late 2009, and the launch of the follow-on

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – University of Maryland’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center researcher Dr. Xin-Zhong Liang, also a professor in the CMNS-Atmospheric & Oceanic Science Department, released a regional climate model last week called the Climate-Weather Research Forecasting Model (CWRF), a significant extension of the original Weather Research Forecasting Model (WRF). The model has been ten years in the making by Dr. Liang’s team in collaboration with NOAA and The National …

The NASA ROSES 2012 has been announced. Below are the main Earth Science  Programs listed this year. Other programs are still TBD or pending.

• (A.10) Ocean Surface Topography Team (delayed – now due March 23rd)
• A.11 Icebridge (due May 1st)
• A.41 Earth System data records (MEASURES) (due May 15th)
• A.13 Modeling, Analysis and Prediction (due May 25th)
• A.3 Ocean Biology (due May 30th)
• A.25 Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) SD-Team (due May 30th)
• A.12 Cryospheric Science (due June

…

Bottom line: A bit of Bolivian colour in the neighbourhood … good hearty food and casual atmosphere. English is not the mother tongue here. The place certainly has the feel of a low-key family restaurant. Bright green exterior/blue awning and orange walls/golden yellow,burgundy tiled flooring on the inside … Univision/Telemundo on the flat screen, jukebox blaring ballads, Real Madrid and Barca banners on the walls … an interesting menu of typical Bolivian food (duck, lamb, rabbit, beef …