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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
On Saturday, September 15, NASA successfully launched the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), a mission meant to measure the changing height of Earth’s ice over the next 3-7 years. This comes at a critical time, as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets rapidly lose ice and contribute to sea level rise, requiring continuous monitoring. ICESat-2 will carry the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS), an instrument that will send 10,000 laser pulses a second to …
On Monday, August 27, CICS-MD hosted the Poster Session and Reception for this year’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Annual Science Conference. A total of 67 posters were on display. Congratulations to the six ESSIC / CICS-MD scientists who presented: – Cezar Kongoli, et al., “Calibration and Validation of the S-NPP Snowfall Detection Algorithm;” – Yuling Liu et al., “Preliminary Quality Assessment of NOAA 20 LST EDR …
