ESSIC /CISESS Research Scientist Isaac Moradi was recently elected as a member of the University of Maryland Research Council. The Research Council is task force deployed by the University Senate that provides guidance to the UMD Vice President for research on matters such as:
ESSIC Associate Director Ralph Ferraro is a member of the new Professional Track (PTK) Working Group, a committee composed of PTK and Tenure Track (TTK) faculty, staff and administrators on behalf of Provost Jennifer King Rice to review and assess current issues related to PTK faculty. The goal of the Working Group is to develop a report of recommendations to Provost Rice on PTK issues.
ESSIC Scientist Santiago Gasso is first author on a new paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that provides an overview of aerosol sources of circular polarization in the atmosphere and discusses possible remote sensing signatures.
Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida on the afternoon of 9/28/2022 as a massive Category 4 storm and brought record-setting winds. As of 10/4/2022, at least 105 people have been reported as casualties of Hurricane Ian, 55 of which in Lee County, Florida. Even more people are without power or their home. The NOAA STAR Flood team has produced VIIRS Flood maps, Sentinel-1 SAR Flood maps, and blended Flood maps to report the flood extent due to Hurricane Ian.
ESSIC Scientist Zhuosen Wang has a new paper in Remote Sensing of Environment that proposes the use of NASA’s Black Marble products to monitor nighttime light.
Tropical Storm Fiona struck Puerto Rico on September 17-18, 2022 causing catastrophic floods and leaving most of the island with a major power outage. Fiona is the first Atlantic storm this season to cause a major disaster. NPreciSe (NOAA Satellite Precipitation Validation System) led by the CISESS science team (Malar Arulraj, Veljko Petkovic, Ralph Ferraro, and Huan Meng), evaluated the performance of the Ensemble Tropical Rainfall Potential (eTRaP) forecasts during this event, using a recently added Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor (MRMS) observation product over Caribbean Islands.
ESSIC/CISESS Scientist Lauren Zamora is first author on a new paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics titled “Comparisons between the distributions of dust and combustion aerosols in MERRA-2, FLEXPART, and CALIPSO and implications for deposition freezing over wintertime Siberia”.
Coastal Alaska was devastated by flooding due to the remnants of Typhoon Merbok (Figure 1a) on September 17, 2022. Storm surge flooded communities along 1,000 miles (1,609 km) of Alaska’s west coast, damaging homes, submerging roads and triggering evacuations. Satellite measurements recorded 17 observations of significant wave height exceeding 14 m (46 feet) on September 16-17 2022 (Figure 1b, dark red dots). Such a sea state is defined as “phenomenal” by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). During the 48-hour period, 5% of all satellite radar altimeter observations in the Bering Sea exceeded 9m (30 ft), defined as “very high” seas by the WMO (Figure 1c) and 19% of observations exceeded 6m (20 ft), WMO “high” seas.
ESSIC/CISESS Scientists Melanie Abecassis and Ronal Vogel received the NESDIS Collaboration Awards for their contributions as part of a team who created new and upgraded existing content exploiting multimedia, and pivoted the CoastWatch Satellite Course to a virtual environment, hosting educational content on CANVAS at UMD/CISESS.
NOAA Coral Reef Watch’s satellite Bleaching Alert Area product shows high heat stress persists in the South and East China Seas, impacting coral reefs throughout the region.
