National Newsletter for the
Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science
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IN THIS ISSUE
- Hello from Hanne
- NASA's Heliophysics Summer School
- CPAESS' Virtual Meeting Capabilities
- Welcome to CPAESS
- CPAESS Updates
- Open Sky and Your Publications
- Who Is CPAESS?
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July 2020
This is
our
newsletter so if you have a cool picture, a suggestion, or a question, please send it!
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Hello Everyone!
I truly hope this finds you all well and in good health. As you may know, the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the nature of some job functions within CPAESS, causing some job duties to come to a halt. With no clear end in sight concerning the impacts of the pandemic, we as an organization have had to explore these staffing challenges as we look at our short- and long-term business needs. With that in mind, it is with a heavy heart that I’m writing to inform you that we’ve had to furlough some of our staff through October 31st.
These staffing changes, effective August 3rd, have impacted the Travel and Events Team, and therefore your travel- and meeting-related requests may be managed by a team member who is new to you. Please know that we are still dedicated to providing stellar service in support of you and your meeting and travel needs during this challenging time.
I know this news might be unsettling. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to
reach out to me. Rest assured we will still be taking care of your travel and event needs. Should you need any assistance, please contact
Melanie Russ.
It is also with great sadness that I inform you that our CPAESS colleagues who work at NOAA’s Office of Water Prediction (OWP) will be transitioning from CPAESS to new employers.
Our staff will have the opportunity to transition to a new employer for their OWP work which will begin October 1, 2020. We greatly value all of our colleagues and their excellent work. I wish each one of them the very best in their futures, and will do all that I can to help their transition go smoothly.
Please know how impressed I am with the work that is being done across our CPAESS program. I truly appreciate all of your efforts. Please stay safe, and I hope you all have the opportunity to enjoy the summer in some measure.
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NASA's Heliophysics Summer School
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Each summer CPAESS manages NASA's “Living With a Star” Heliophysics Summer School (HSS) on UCAR's Boulder campus. This year we had to figure out how to translate a two-week long in-person course including faculty lectures, modeling laboratories, student development exercises, career panels, and poster sessions, into a virtual setting. To make things more complicated we had students from 8 different time zones across the world participating, and needed to adjust the schedule accordingly. With a bit of ingenuity this year’s summer school was held from July 6-17th.
The trick for professors is always the same - engagement - whether you are in-person or not. Anyone can present material for hours on end, but keeping your students interested and actively participating is the hallmark of a great educator. Fortunately, we had those with School Facilitator Nick Gross of Boston University, and School Deans Dana Longcope of Montana State University and Amitava Bhattacharjee of Princeton University.
To begin to create a community among the students and faculty members we created a HSS Slack channel and asked both students and faculty to complete a Slack profile which included their picture and a short introductory message about themselves. Students were given pre-readings and activities to look at prior to the beginning of classes. They were then sorted into 8 time zone groups to complete asynchronous lab work and assigned activities. Any questions or results were posted to the Slack channel that was monitored by the school Deans and faculty members. Students were also assigned to synchronous groups for questions and answer sessions and lecture discussions. The synchronous groups were changed at the beginning of Week 2 to allow students to work with a broader cross section of students.
Students began their first live session by delivering their elevator speeches in Zoom breakout rooms. Throughout the two weeks they were treated to many guest lecturers including lead program scientist for NASA's “Living With a Star” initiative Dr. Madhulika Guhathakurta. The 32 students were also able to listen to the expertise of Drs. Delores Knipp, Janet Green, Jiong Qiu, Tim Fuller Rowell, W. Kent Tobiska, and William Murtagh.
Additionally, career panelists Educational Director Claire Rafferty of the National Solar Observatory; Research Scientist Hazel Bain of the University of Colorado Boulder and NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center; and Senior Research Scientist Andres Munoz-Jaramillo of the Southwest Research Institute answered questions generated by the students. At the end of the panel they broke into 3 breakout rooms. Each room had a panelist and a Dean or the School Facilitator Nick Gross. The students could then join each breakout room to talk to the panelists and ask them questions in a less formal environment.
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Top: Screenshot of a group session. Middle: A peek at the sorting of students by time zone in Slack. Bottom: Slide from Bill Murtagh of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center gi
ves a guest lecture on Zoom.
Students watched previously recorded heliophysics core lectures on the CPAESS YouTube channel, and then met in online Zoom sessions to review the lecture content, have question and answer sessions, and work on assigned activities in breakout groups. The Zoom breakout rooms were used to work on their lab and assigned activities from the free online textbook "Principles of Heliophysics: a textbook on the universal processes behind planetary habitability" written by Karel Schrijver et al. The Deans and Nick would join the breakout rooms to answer questions if they came up while the students were working. Office hours were held on Zoom before and after each day's sessions allowing students to speak with various lecturers on questions that pertained to their individual research needs. Class materials including the textbook, presentations, support videos, and articles were all uploaded onto our website.
Because this was our first foray into building a virtual school we surveyed students along the way to improve the process and level of engagement as we went along. Some comments we received were that "Everyone is respected. Opinions are freely expressed. The discussion is active and everyone is engaged in the work." Also “I really enjoyed the experience. I was struck by the diversity of speakers: multiple women, multiple people of color, faculty members, industry employees, civil servants. That's the first time that I've seen so many women and people of color on the schedule to purely talk science…Thank you so much for running this program, again I really enjoyed it and would absolutely recommend it in the future.” When we asked generally about how the school was going we were delighted to hear that "organizers seem to be so accessible it’s nice and I think it makes everyone feel very comfortable."
CPAESS Program Administrator Kendra Greb and our Meeting Planner Tammy Kepple worked with the Summer School Deans and Nick Gross to create an effective program in a virtual setting. Based on student feedback we feel it went well. "The multimedia staff are total rock stars!” “You did amazing work and organization! Even during such a terrible time. A great THANK YOU!" We are so delighted the excellent education this program provides was able to effectively continue through the pandemic. A sincere thank you for the efforts of many scientists, educators, and staff that made it possible.
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CPAESS' Virtual Meeting Capabilities
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During the pandemic many of the critical in-person meetings, conferences, and workshops that typically occur have ground to a halt. Nevertheless the idea-sharing and brainstorming that are the fruit of these meetings are critical to move science forward.
Many people have been utilizing a variety of methods to meet virtually. The problem is that managing a meeting and babysitting it’s technological aspects detracts an organizer’s attention from the content of the meeting and it’s scientific purpose. As professional meeting planners CPAESS has been happy to let our partners do the science, while we take care of the rest. Here are some recent examples of virtual meetings we’ve managed.
CEDAR - This year’s NSF 2020 Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) conference was converted from an on-site meeting initially to be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico to a virtual conference. CPAESS provided the virtual meeting support for this workshop held 22 - 26 June 2020. The meeting was held in collaboration with NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory (HAO). Virtual talks were recorded on Zoom and broadcast onto our YouTube channel. Break out sessions utilized various programs based on host preference. Posters & abstracts were hosted on a YouTube channel with 10-15 minute individual presentations. Questions and answers as well as further interactivity was facilitated with Slido.
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Above: Kendra Greb monitoring the NASA Heliophysics Virtual Summer School.
NASA’s "Living With A Star" Heliophysics Summer School - CPAESS managed a 2-week long virtual NASA Heliophysics Summer School held 6-17 July 2020. Lectures, labs, career panels, and office hours were all managed virtually over 8 different time zones. The meeting was held in collaboration with NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory (HAO). Lectures took place on Zoom then were later uploaded onto YouTube. Laboratory activities and school office hours held on Slack and Slack groups based on time zone. Class materials - textbook, lecture notes, support videos, etc. were all uploaded to a website and a YouTube channel.
SIMA - CPAESS managed the virtual Community Workshop System for Integrated Modeling of the Atmosphere (SIMA) held 29 June - 1 July 2020. This NSF-sponsored event was executed in collaboration with NCAR’s Climate & Global Dynamics (CGD). Meetings were conducted through Zoom and Zoom Meetings, and a variety of interactivity software was utilized for questions and interactivity.
In addition to virtual technologies, our staff members are professional meeting planners who will create websites, registration portals, and who have years of experience managing a variety of logistics. So while the pandemic has changed the nature of scientific gatherings for now, we are ready to continue facilitating the important growth that comes because of them.
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CPAESS is pleased to welcome these new employees. We are delighted to have you on board.
- Lindsay Goodwin, NASA Jack Eddy Postdoctoral Fellow
- Nina Whitney, NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow
- Uday Kunwar Thapa, NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow
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U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program Update
U.S. CLIVAR Update
- U.S. CLIVAR in the process of hosting our three separate Summer Panel Meetings virtually and will conclude August 4
- Mid-August look out for their Fall Workshop Call (The US CLIVAR program annually sponsors open community workshops, conferences, and science meetings to coordinate, develop, plan, and implement new or focused activities for the benefit of the scientific community and relevant to the goals of US CLIVAR. Workshops can serve as an initiation point in the planning process for future community activities. Funding is limited and not all submitted workshop requests may be supported.). Virtual options are available.
- September look out for their Fall Working Group Call (The US CLIVAR program establishes limited-lifetime, action-oriented Working Groups of scientists to coordinate and implement focused activities for the benefit of the scientific community. This year's call supports the possibility of one new Working Group, which will be initiated by Spring 2020 and undertake actionable and measurable tasks over a 2–3 year period)
- As always, everyone is invited to join one of our webinar series that are ongoing for the indefinite future
- Abstract submission deadlines are coming up. For the Fall AGU Meeting the deadline is July 29 and for the AMS Annual Meeting it is August 24.
- Here is a list of US CLIVAR-relevant sessions to help digest the collection of the hundreds of sessions and events (see: AGU Fall Meeting, AMS Annual Meeting).
General Update
Just a reminder that we have the Inside CPAESS newsletters and CPAESS Splashes
archived here
in case there was a particularly useful link or bit of information in one of them that you need. Our
CPAESS "For Staff" Information page
has lots of useful links for you.
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Open Sky and Your Publications
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Part of your employment expectations is listing your publications in
OpenSky
on the UCAR/NCAR website. Please make sure you list all your publications there. If you haven't yet, you can list them now and catch up.
The purpose of this digital archive is to provide free and open access to the scientific output and other intellectual resources created at NCAR/UCAR for the advancement of the atmospheric and related sciences.
In the Acknowledgements section scientists note the agency and grant number that supported their research.
Please
g
o to our
CPAESS "For Staff" Information page
and click on the Citing Language and Information tab. Your CIT login is the same as your WorkDay login info. If you have any questions
please let us know
. Thanks very much!
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Recent Publications
Klotzbach, Philip J., Michael M. Bell, Steven G. Bowen, Ethan J. Gibney, Kenneth R. Knapp, Carl J. Schreck, 2020:
Surface pressure a more skillful predictor of normalized hurricane damage than maximum sustained wind. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,
OpenSky.
Kuroda, Natsuha, J. Martin Laming, 2020:
Magnetic field geometry and composition variation in slow solar winds: The case of sulfur. The Astrophysical Journal,
OpenSky.
Mokarram, Marzieh, Ali Saber, Parisa Mohammadizadeh, Ali Abdolali, 2020:
Determination of artificial recharge location using analytic hierarchy process and Dempster–Shafer theory. Environmental Earth Sciences,
OpenSky.
Murakami, Hiroyuki, Thomas L. Delworth, William F. Cooke, Ming Zhao, Baoqiang Xiang, Pang-Chi Hsu, 2020:
Detected climatic change in global distribution of tropical cyclones. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
OpenSky.
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Even people employed by CPAESS ask about the breadth and depth of the programs and opportunities we provide. Here is a super brief primer. CPAESS is a part of the UCAR/NCAR family. Specifically, we are within UCAR’s Community Programs (UCP). CPAESS is the largest of UCAR's Community Programs.
CPAESS’ provides early career opportunities including employment at federal labs across the nation. We also host multi-agency programs and have partnerships with federal agencies –take a peek to get an idea of some of them
listed here
. CPAESS provides postdoctoral and educational programs. Lastly, we convene scientific communities to help promulgate scientific information and foster collaboration across the earth system science community. Here is a list of
our upcoming events
.
CPAESS has approximately 125 employees, over 100 of which are spread across the United States as seen on the map below. If you
go here
you can click on a location and you'll see staff grouped by program work. Many of our co-workers are in federal labs. Our staff's skill sets are impressively diverse. We appreciate you and your talents being a part of the CPAESS family.
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