Category: Archive

University of Maryland Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) Director, Professor Antonio Busalacchi, was invited to Capitol Hill last month to educate congressional and National Governors Association staffers about El Niño, the recurring Pacific Ocean temperature anomaly whose intensity this winter is on course to set new records. An El Niño occurs when Pacific trade winds slacken, allowing warm water from the Western Pacific to shift east toward South …

ESSIC / AOSC Professor Raghu Murtuddue had a recent Op-ed article published in India's Fundamatics entitled, "Water, Water, Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink."  The post discussed India's on-going difficulties with water usage, management, and conservation and the country's need to begin managing it as an interconnected resource with food, energy, and health.  Fundmatics is a quarterly (Jan, April, July and Oct) print (Magazine) and online (E-zine) publication …

With Thanksgiving a now distant memory and the current El Niño event being referred to as the strongest ever recorded, what does Old Man Winter have in-store for the DC-area for the winter of 2015-16, particularly with respect to snowfall? ESSIC’s resident “storm watcher,” Phil Arkin, reports that El Niño winters tend to be feast or famine for area snow lovers. “El Niño winters have been some of the least snowy in the DC area, like 1997-98 …

Tuesday, 1 December 2015

Zhanqing Li, a University of Maryland atmospheric and oceanic science professor and Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) researcher, was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on Nov. 23.

Li and 346 other fellows in the 2015 cohort were chosen “in recognition of their contributions to innovation, education, and scientific leadership,” according to AAAS. Li, who has been a UMD professor since 2001, has made his mark as

ESSIC Assistant Research Scientist Augusto Getirana’s study of water availability forecasting in the Tigris-Euphrates River Basin appears in the November edition of GEWEX News, the quarterly newsletter of the World Climate Research Programme’s Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment. Getirana, ESSIC Research Associate Amy McNally and other co-authors are studying African and Middle Eastern catchments that see heavy human use but are “data sparse.” Their work is …

Tuesday, 17 November 2015

University of Maryland Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center Director, Professor Antonio Busalacchi, testified Tuesday morning in a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing on opportunities for public-private partnerships in Earth observation.

As a former NASA scientist and chief of the Laboratory for Hydrospheric Processes at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Busalacchi was the source selection official for the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS). Orbital Sciences