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El Niño and La Niña Responsible for India’s Cold Winter, Writes Murtugudde

ESSIC/AOSC Professor Raghu Murtugudde recently wrote an article in Tech2 titled “El Niño and La Niña Tinker with Western Disturbances and India’s Winters Too”. In the article, he discusses the unusually cold winter that India has experienced this year.  Though many point to the term “polar vortex” to explain these temperatures, Murtugudde points to El Niño, which affects India’s “Subtropical Westerly Jet” (SWJ), a jet stream that acts as a conduit to western disturbances; …

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NOAA Coral Reef Watch – Successfully Predicting and Monitoring Coral Reef Bleaching Worldwide Since 1997

Coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world.  They provide significant ecological, economic, and societal benefits, from supporting marine species to protecting our coastlines to generating $9.8 trillion per year globally and $3.4 billion in the United States alone. But global threats like climate change are putting corals and other reef organisms at risk.  Warming ocean temperatures create heat stress for corals, causing them to eject the microscopic algae that give …

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Can Planting Trees Mitigate Global Warming? Murtugudde Questions in Recent Article

ESSIC/AOSC Professor Raghu Murtugudde recently published an article in Tech2 titled, “The Trouble with Relying on Trees as Carbon Sink to Do Our Global Warming Bidding”. In the piece, Murtugudde tackles the commonly-held notion that forests are a net ‘sink’ of carbon and a major player in mitigating global warming. He writes that though trees certainly help capture carbon, they also emit a number of emit a number of Volatile Organic Carbon compounds (VOCs).  One VOC, isoprene, can …

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Wild Published on Energy-Ecology-Sediment Tradeoffs in Mekong River Basin

ESSIC Visiting Assistant Research Engineer Thomas Wild recently published a paper titled “Balancing Hydropower Development and Ecological Impacts in the Mekong: Tradeoffs for Sambor Mega Dam” in Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management. The paper focuses on navigating energy-ecology-sediment tradeoffs in the Mekong River basin in search of ecologically-focused hydropower alternatives more balanced than current infrastructure and proposed operations.  Contributions of the paper …

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UMD Researchers and Resilinc Corp. Create Index of Climate Change Risk to Company Supply Chains

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Last year a series of severe weather events including the late-winter storm that hit the U.S. Northeast, followed by weather-related damage that closed the U.S.-Mexico Laredo border, and subsequent U.S. landfall hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria contributed to a doubling of global supply chain disruption and, for the first time, made the United States the region most-impacted by such disruption. These impacts, highlighted in a recent report, form part of the impetus for a …

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Bill Lau Explains 134-Year-Old Blanford Hypothesis

ESSIC Research Scientist Bill Lau recently wrote a paper that provided a plausible explanation to the Blanford hypothesis, an 1884 observation of a connection between springtime snow cover on the Tibetan Plateau and the intensity of the summer monsoon season in India. Lau found that the before the monsoons begin, dark aerosols such as dust and soot settle on the Tibetan Plateau’s snowpack and absorb sunlight, causing the snow to melt more quickly.  In years with heavy springtime dust …

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ESSIC / CICS-MD Scientists Published on the GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager

ESSIC / CICS-MD Visiting Associate Research Scientists Fangfang Yu and Zhipeng Wang were recently published on a new CICS Task entitled “Calibration Support for Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI)”. The Advanced Baseline Imager is an instrument onboard the GOES-R satellites that images Earth’s weather, oceans and environment.  The GOES-R ABI has presented many new challenges in radiometric calibration, or calibrating image data to radiance, reflectance, or brightness temperatures. These are …

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ESSIC / CICS Contributions in the new AMS “State of the Climate in 2017”

The American Meteorological Society just released their annual State of the Climate report as a supplement to the August issue of the Bulletin of AMS.  Five ESSIC / CICS-MD scientists wrote sections of the report: ● Jim Reagan (NCEI) provided an annual summary of the subsurface seawater salinity as well as the introductory section on Salinity in the Global Oceans chapter. ● Robert Adler (NCEI) co-authored the precipitation subsection for the Hydrological Cycle section in the Global …

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Vintzileos presents at World Climate Research Programme Conference in Boulder

ESSIC / CICS-MD assistant research scientist Augustin Vintzileos recently presented at the World Climate Research Programme’s Second International Conference on Subseasonal to Seasonal Prediction (S2S) in Boulder, Colorado. The presentation, titled “Excessive Heat Events and Health: Building Resilience based on Global Scale Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Excessive Heat Outlook Systems”, used data from the S2S database to demonstrate the feasibility of S2S forecasting of excessive heat events, …

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