Category: Archive

New UMD-led research shows unusual three-year spike in late-season surface melt due to bursts of warm, dry wind from Antarctic Peninsula’s mountains The Antarctic Peninsula is the northernmost part of Earth’s coldest continent, making it particularly vulnerable to a changing global climate. Surface melting of snow and ice initiated the breakup of the peninsula’s northernmost Larsen A ice shelf in 1995, followed in 2002 by the Larsen B ice shelf to the south, which lost a section roughly …

Recently, ESSIC / CICS-MD Senior Faculty Specialist Jeannette Wild co-authored several chapters of the Long-term Ozone Trends and Uncertainties in the Stratosphere (LOTUS) Report, a two-year endeavor to characterize the status and possible recovery of global ozone using datasets from satellite and ground instruments. The study also sought to classify and determine the associated error estimates of the trends derived from the instruments.  The proper understanding of the error is crucial to …

This week, ESSIC/CICS Associate Research Professor Melissa Kenney gave a keynote address at the Patuxent River Conference, a gathering of scientists, environmental educators, and natural resource managers to discuss the health and future of the Patuxent River.  This year’s theme for the conference was “Climate Change & the Patuxent River: Local Implications of Global Issues”. In the address, Kenney spoke about the environmental management challenges that come …

Last week, staff from NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW), an initiative now supported by the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center-administered Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS), published a commentary piece in Frontiers in Marine Science contesting an article that claimed mass coral bleaching has been occurring on the Great Barrier Reef for the last 400 years, rather than being a recent phenomenon. In the article, “Commentary: Reconstructing Four Centuries of …