On Tuesday, July 12, the College Park area was ravaged by three storm complexes fueled by the influx of hot and humid air and powered by strong high-altitude winds. The storms brought down countless trees and caused thousands of people to lose power. ESSIC scientist Will Miller provides some commentary on the storm’s trajectory and intensification.
Alexey Mishonov, ESSIC/CISESS Associate Research Scientist and NOAA Affiliate, has created the first trans-Arctic section of beam attenuation to estimate particle distribution.
Ten ESSIC scientists participated at the 10th Workshop of the International Precipitation Working Group (IPWG), held in Ft. Collins, Colorado, June 13-17, 2022.
In the newly released 2022 Top Scientist rankings by Research.com, 18 University of Maryland researchers ranked among the Top 1,000 Environmental Sciences researchers in the United States, and seven ranked among the Top 1,000 worldwide. Of those 18 UMD scientists, 6 are ESSIC scientists.
Ron Vogel, ESSIC/CISESS Senior Faculty Specialist, served as a subject matter expert at a scientific advisory panel of the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP), the EPA-led partnership to restore a healthy Chesapeake Bay. The panel sought to advance the CBP’s current water quality data monitoring program to include new technologies such as satellites to improve its water quality assessments. Vogel outlined the current state of the science of satellite data products available for water quality analysis, including surface water light attenuation and suspended matter concentration.
GEO Blue Planet, a network of ocean and coastal-observers, social scientists and end-user representatives, will hold its 5th Symposium from October 24-28, 2022. It will take place in-person in Accra, Ghana with a virtual component. This year’s theme will focus on GEO Blue Planet’s core actions areas, “capacity development, stakeholder engagement & cooperation & co-design driving sustained ocean and coastal observations for society”.
ESSIC/CISESS Scientist Korak Saha and collaborator Huai-min Zhang have been improving the NOAA/NCEI Blended Seawinds (NBS) product. NBS blends several satellite estimates of surface wind, providing more accurate and gap-free observational data for model calibration and quality control. NOAA has been producing a global gridded 0.25-degree and 6-hourly sea surface winds product that has wide applications in marine transportation, marine ecosystem and fisheries, offshore winds, weather and ocean forecasts, among others.
For more than 20 years, NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) has been the world’s leader in observing, predicting, and communicating changes in the coral reef environment to a diverse, global user community. In mid-December 2021, CRW’s daily global 5km-resolution satellite coral bleaching heat stress products detected a significant build-up of oceanic heat stress on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), Australia. This signified the GBR was starting its 2021-2022 summer season with a much earlier onset of accumulated heat stress than ever recorded before. At the same time, CRW’s modeled Four-Month Coral Bleaching Heat Stress Outlook indicated the significant heat stress would continue, leading to a potential mass coral bleaching event on the GBR (following on the heels of confirmed mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017, and 2020).
NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) scientists are exploring new capabilities of enhancing satellite images with artificial intelligence (AI) so that moderate resolution images could be enhanced to include more detailed features with high resolution.
Wenhui Wang, ESSIC/CISESS Associate Research Scientist, is first author on a new paper titled “An Improved Method for VIIRS Radiance Limit Verification and Saturation Rollover Flagging” recently published in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. Other ESSIC/CISESS scientists credited on the project include Slawomir Blonski, Bin Zhang, and Sirish Uprety.
