National Newsletter for the
Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science
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IN THIS ISSUE
- Hello from Hanne
- Secrets of Coronal Mass Ejections
- NOAA C&GC Pre-AGU Networking Meeting
- NOAA Bill Lapenta Internship Program
- 15 Year Anniversary
- CPAESS Discovery Seminars
- News from U.S. CLIVAR
- News from U.S. Carbon Cycle
- Welcome to CPAESS
- Open Sky and Your Publications
- Who Is CPAESS?
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December 2021
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 would like to thank you for all of your hard work this past year. Continually adapting our routines within the confines of the pandemic hasn’t been easy. I truly appreciate your flexibility and effort to generate excellent work in spite of these challenges.
This week is AGU in New Orleans and many of you are giving town halls, oral presentations, and posters. Please check out the list of CPAESS talks here. In about a month, many of you will also be presenting at AMS in Houston. If you are, please list your talk, poster, or town hall here so that we can communicate your efforts to UCAR and beyond.
I would like to give a special congratulations to Seubson “Golf” Soisuvarn who is a Project Scientist I at National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) for his 15 year anniversary working at UCAR. Please read more about Seubson below.
I would also like to give you a few end-of-the-year reminders. Please be sure to list all of your publications on UCAR’s OpenSky. This is our venue to make sure research is freely available to the public. It is an important part of your employment agreement to share all of your research to benefit the ESS community. Secondly, we sent you our CPAESS Scientific Self Assessment Inquiry form. Please complete this by close of business Thursday, December 16, 2021. Lastly, as described below CPAESS will begin a Seminar Series at UCAR | NCAR this coming year. Please feel free to sign up here to present your research to your colleagues at UCAR | NCAR and the public.
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I just want to thank you for your excellent work this past year. Each one of you is critical to CPAESS, and each of you is greatly appreciated. May you have a sincerely happy and relaxing holiday season and new year!
Sincerely,
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Searching for the Secrets
of Coronal Mass Ejections
CPAESS Scientist Dr. Camilla Scolini is currently a NASA Jack Eddy Fellow working with Dr. Reka Winslow at the University of New Hampshire.
Recently her research led to a number of publications concerning the evolution of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) as they travel from the Sun. A CME is a mass ejection of highly magnetized plasma from the Sun’s corona into space. They travel at speeds from “250 kilometers per second (km/s) to as fast as near 3,000 km/s (NOAA).” These eruptions can create beautiful auroras here on Earth, but can also cause radio and magnetic disturbances with the potential to have great impacts on GPS, communications, satellites, and electrical grids.
One of the larger questions Scolini was investigating is whether the changes to CMEs as they travel are based on their intrinsic nature or because they are influenced by interactions with other forces. In her quest to find answers about the nature of CMEs, Scolini used a combination of computational modeling and observations. While there is a need for increased observational data near our Sun, Scolini was able to use data recorded by spacecraft in radial alignment with each other (two different points on the same trajectory) of several CMEs. This information shows what a CME looks like at one point of its journey from the Sun, and then at a later point on that same journey. This data is used in conjunction with different forecasting models to examine whether the evolution of a CME’s magnetic structure changes due to its inherent nature, or if it is due to an outside influence such as large-scale solar wind structures.
In conjunction with observational data, Scolini also used numerical models. She exploited their 3D nature to get a hypothetical view of a global CME structure in the heliosphere. Her findings show that both observational and computational findings are complementary in their results. This is good news for research, particularly until we can get more spacecraft observations near the Sun.
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(Coronal Mass Ejection - CME, courtesy of NASA)
When asked what the major take-aways were from her current research, Dr. Scolini said that “interactions with other solar wind structures have a much larger impact on CME structure than typically acknowledged.” And that “changes in the magnetic complexities of CMEs seem to be driven by interactions with other interplanetary structures rather than being intrinsic to the CME evolution in general.”
This unique research is laying important groundwork in understanding CMEs and the changes they undergo through space. It has far-reaching implications both broadly and as the relationship between the Sun and the Earth continues to be examined. While we understand that CMEs can negatively impact the Earth’s satellites and weather, our understanding of the nature of CMEs is nascent and evolving. The work of Dr. Scolini and her fellow scholars lay a critical foundation for better understanding the complexity and nature of CMEs, and by extension ultimately how they influence space weather and affect us here on Earth.
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NOAA C&GC Pre-AGU Networking Meeting |
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On the afternoon of December 3, 2021, CPAESS hosted a Pre-AGU Networking Meeting for the NOAA Climate and Global Change Fellowship Program. In light of the pandemic, this was arranged to facilitate connectivity and networking among NOAA leadership, alumni, and current fellows. NOAA leadership was able to express their thoughts on the value of this program, and for current fellows to highlight their work. About 50 people attended the meeting. Kendra Greb was the lead facilitator, and Hanne Mauriello gave opening remarks.
Dr. Wayne Higgins, head of NOAA’s Climate Program Office shared that “I have no reservations saying that within my portfolio, this is my favorite program.” The NOAA Climate and Global Change Fellowship was founded by Michael Hall in 1990 and has been managed by UCAR since its inception. Higgins gave an overview of the program, congratulated, and welcomed our 2021 fellows. He noted that this program has had 247 postdoctoral fellows, who averaged 4 publications each during their fellowship. The postdocs have been hosted in 63 different U.S. institutions, and currently work in 134 institutions worldwide. Their membership even includes 2 MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” awardees.
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After that each current fellow gave a brief overview of their current research. Here is a brief overview: |
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Henri Drake is at Princeton and NOAA GFDL. He is a physical oceanographer studying dynamical theory, numerical modeling, and climate impacts of rotating and stratified ocean flows. He is exploring how to integrate deep ocean climate dynamics into global climate models.
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Robert Fabjer is at the University of Washington and is researching the connection between atmospheric dynamics and climate feedbacks and applying it to the Arctic. The Arctic is uniquely difficult because there is such a large predictive spread of temperature change.
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Brittany Hupp is at Oregan State University and studies paleoceanography and paleo-climatology by measuring calcium in plankton. Her goal is to see how high latitude marine waters have dealt with climate changes in the past.
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Andrea Jenney is at the University of California in Irvine and is researching atmospheric vertical microstructure, in particular of shallow stable layers, cloud resolving models, and cloud processes.
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Xiaomeng Jin is an atmospheric chemist at the University of California in Berkeley studying how wildfires influence NOx emissions, both short term and lifetime, as well as what air quality impacts they ultimately influence.
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Isabel McCoy is at the University of Miami using satellite, ship, and flight observations to understand the role that mesoscale cloud morphologies play in our climate. In particular, whether shifts in cloud morphology occurrence will contribute a low cloud feedback under climate change.
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Lindsay McCulloch is at Harvard and in her research pairs field-based measurements of symbiotic N fixation in Neotropical canopy gaps with remotely sensed data of canopy gap height and their prevalence to improve our understanding of terrestrial N cycling, and how much carbon ecosystems can store.
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Sebastian Milinski is working at NCAR and uses climate model simulations to separate the chaotic internal variability and externally forced signals. He is currently researching why the eastern Pacific has cooled in recent decades and what this means for the Earth’s climate sensitivity.
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Mukund Rao is working at the University of California in David on trying to better understand the forest carbon cycle by studying the environmental controls of carbon uptake via photosynthesis and its allocation in tree growth, and how it affects their role as carbon sinks. (See Mukund in the picture above)
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Lettie Roach is studying at Scripps at the University of California, San Diego exploring processes driving the seasonality of sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctic with the goal of gaining insight that might improve climate projections and modeling.
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Katherine Siegel is at the University of Colorado in Boulder using econometric causal inference methods, geospatial analysis, ecological functional trait analysis, and ecosystem service modeling to explore the links between forest management, wildfire severity, post-fire changes in vegetation communities and ecosystem services.
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Uday Thapa is a paleoclimatologist studying at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He is using tree rings and climate model simulations to better understand our earth’s climate over the past several centuries/millennia, including the dynamics of the subtropical jet over the Himalayas (Himalayan jet) during the past millennium.
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Nina Whitney is at Wood’s Hole at MIT researching the hydrographic history of the rapidly warming western North Atlantic over the last millennium to discover the primary drivers of hydrographic variability. She is using isotope geochemistry in ocean quahog shells and high-resolution ocean model simulations (CESM-LME and FOCI-VIKING10) as a means of finding these drivers. (See Nina in the picture to the right)
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Barbara Wortham is at the University of California in Berkeley to develop a record of how trees are recording carbon fixation vs. photosynthesis in a deposit of fossilized Juniper trees from the La Brea tarpits.
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Madeline Youngs is at New York University studying how Southern Ocean circulation at topography and associated carbon fluxes vary with climate, as well as how mid-latitude atmosphere storm tracks change with climate.
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Needless to say, the breadth and depth of their research is impressive. After the scientific snapshots of each fellow’s work, Dr. Jin Huang spoke about our virtual monthly networking sessions which connect both fellows and alumni with NOAA scientists. Dr. Jin Huang is a great champion of this program, and the fellowship has made great gains in the number of fellowships available under her direction. She is hopeful that any potential budget increases to her program, can ultimately translate into more research funding opportunities for the fellowship and students.
The NOAA Climate and Global Change Fellowship is a prestigious program with alumni actively working on climate change and engaging with each other. Applications for next year’s class are due January 7, 2022. Find out more about this program here and how to apply here.
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NOAA Bill Lapenta Internship Program Update |
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As you may recall we had a record-breaking 34 interns participating in the NOAA Bill Lapenta Internship program that CPAESS manages. Here is a taste of two more of the interns and the work they accomplished under their NOAA mentors.
Quinn Bustos is a technical communication student at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. As a Lapenta intern, she worked with other interns, Nicole Hilton and Lauren Crane, under her mentor Frank Niepold to create an inventory of federal programs that advance the nation’s Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) agenda. “Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) is a term adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)...The over-arching goal of ACE is to empower all members of society to engage in climate action, through education, training, public awareness, public participation, public access to information, and international cooperation on these issues (UNFCC).” So investigating how NOAA and other federal agencies fit into this goal is an important assessment.
Bustos and her team combed through a great variety of federal programs to determine which ones served the specific goals of ACE. Not all programs include a climate public awareness component, although NOAA’s programs frequently did. Quinn notes that “we had inventoried over 200 programs in seven agencies and departments.” This inventory process also enabled her to examine the audience most served by these programs, which was the public, an important element of ACE education goals.
Another Lapenta intern was Anna Sitzman who attends Loyola University in New Orleans. Her internship focused on the Great Lakes and she is continuing this work for her senior capstone project. Anna was mentored by Nancy Beller-Simms and Ned Gardiner researching stormwater infrastructure in the Great Lakes region. She analyzed data on precipitation, lake level changes, and river flood stages in addition to learning the history of the water infrastructure in the region. “My research culminated into an ArcGIS Storymap titled Combined Sewer Systems, Climate Change Impacts, Vulnerability, and Adaptations in the Great Lakes Region.”
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Sitzman created interactive maps for each Great Lake state exploring changing precipitation statistics in these areas, their adaptations such as in engineering and flood prevention, personal stories associated with climate changes in the area, and generally creating a snapshot of the effects of climate change for viewers.
“After working in CPO, I have a greater appreciation for interdisciplinary work after seeing the AdSci and WaRT groups work together. They bring so many perspectives and specialties to work toward a common goal of improving education and people’s lives.”
The NOAA Bill Lapenta Internship covers a wide range of climate-change related educational mentorship experiences ranging from how to improve understanding of forecasting problems, operational model development, the incorporation of social science to communicate science, and earth system science with climate as a cross-disciplinary area. Find out more, and apply to be a NOAA Bill Lapenta intern here. The deadline is December 31, 2021.
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Congratulations to Seubson Soisuvarn, a UCAR | CPAESS Project Scientist. Since 2006, he has been a member of the NOAA Ocean Surface Winds Science Team at the Center for Satellite Applications and Research, National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). His interests are in the fields of active and passive microwave remote sensing. He focuses on the ocean surface wind retrievals development, refinement, and validation. He has worked on calibration and validation of scatterometer and GNSS-R data including all three ASCATs, Oceansat-2, ISS-RapidScat, SCATSAT-1, TechDemoSat-1, and CYGNSS. He has produced more than 30 publications.
Seubson Soisuvarn has developed the high wind geophysical model function that has been implemented to improve the ASCAT high wind retrievals. The ASCAT high wind products have been used operationally by the NOAA/National Weather Service and have contributed to the hurricane/extreme wind event detections and warnings. He has worked in the development of the Indian scatterometers (Oceansat-2, SCATSAT-1) wind retrievals that have been experimentally explored by the NOAA forecasters. He is currently working on high-resolution ASCAT coastal wind development that would provide a great impact on the extreme wind detection and warning in the coastal regions.
Seubson Soisuvarn received the B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from Kasetsart University, Bangkok, Thailand, in 1998, and the M.S.E.E. and the Ph. D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA, in 2001 and 2006 respectively. Soisuvarn is also known as “Golf.” Since his father loves to play golf, he was given him a Thai nickname “Golf.” He also loves to play golf himself with his daughter Daisy. He lives with his wife Ajjima, and daughter in Alexandria, Virginia.
The CPAESS team congratulates Golf for his 15 year anniversary!
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CPAESS Discovery Seminars |
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This coming year CPAESS will begin our Seminar Series! Many of you have expressed an interest to share your research, and to connect more with the greater UCAR | NCAR Community. This is an opportunity for you to do both. Much like several of the NCAR labs, CPAESS will have a speaker present their research for about 45 minutes of the allotted 1 hour-long seminar. These presentations will be advertised within the UCAR | NCAR Community and our extended university and academic community. They will be broadcast by UCAR’s multimedia services and our meeting planners will manage the seminar itself. After the presentation, we will have a brief question and answer period. These talks will be recorded and uploaded onto our website, and YouTube for future access. Each talk will be given on a Wednesday at 11:00 am MST.
The CPAESS Seminar Series will give you the opportunity to connect with the greater UCAR | NCAR community and share your research. Please note that we will need you to get permission to speak from your sponsor agency, and understand that they may have parameters for you concerning the content of your talk. Certain organizations may have more rigorous requirements in terms of permissions, so please keep that timing in mind if you sign up to present a seminar. Here is the sign-up sheet. Please know that If we have a lot of requests to speak, we will do our best to expand this new program. If you have any questions please reach out to Dawn Mullally.
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News from the U.S. Carbon Cycle Program |
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Lastly, the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science would like to announce its Call for Applications for the U.S. Carbon Program Leadership Award. The U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program, in collaboration with the North American Carbon Program (NACP), is pleased to announce the first U.S. Carbon Program Leadership Award in support of the North American carbon cycle community’s engagement, communication and collaboration opportunities. This award activity is aimed at advancing our broader diversity, equity, inclusivity, accessibility and justice goals which are essential for fulfilling our national and global science priorities and mandates in support of the 1990 Global Change Research Act to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change. This activity also aims to support our mission to coordinate and facilitate federally funded carbon cycle research, and provide leadership to the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) on carbon cycle science priorities.
This award will support the meeting or workshop travel costs (accommodations, transportation and per diem for in-person meeting; registration costs for virtual or in-person meeting) of early career and/or under-represented students, scientists and practitioners primarily from North America (U.S., Canada and Mexico). Find out more details and explore the application guidelines found here.
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CPAESS is pleased to welcome these new employees. We are delighted to have you on board.
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Cynthia Graddy, Meeting Planner, US CLIVAR Project Office
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Luis Cortes-Hernandez, Program Specialist, National Hurricane Center (NHC)
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Kaity Goldsmith, Program Specialist, NOAA Ocean Acidification Program (OAP)
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Katherine Siegel, Postdoctoral Fellow, NOAA Climate and Global Change (C&GC)
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Robert Fajber, Postdoctoral Fellow, NOAA Climate and Global Change (C&GC)
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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 go 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
ACCELERATED RECENT WARMING AND TEMPERATURE VARIABILITY OVER THE PAST EIGHT CENTURIES IN THE CENTRAL ASIAN ALTAI FROM BLUE INTENSITY IN TREE RINGS
Davi, N. K., Rao, M. P., Wilson, R., Andreu‐Hayles, L., Oelkers, R., D'Arrigo, R., … Suran, B. (2021). Accelerated recent warming and temperature variability over the past eight centuries in the Central Asian Altai from blue intensity in tree rings. Geophysical Research Letters, 48, e2021GL092933. doi:10.1029/2021GL092933 Open Sky
INCREASING DIFFERENCE IN INTERANNUAL SUMMERTIME SURFACE AIR TEMPERATURE BETWEEN INTERIOR EAST ANTARCTICA AND THE ANTARCTIC PENINSULA UNDER FUTURE CLIMATE SCENARIOS
Mao, R., Kim, S. ‐J., Gong, D. ‐Y., Liu, X., Wen, X., Zhang, L., … Park, S. ‐J. (2021). Increasing difference in interannual summertime surface air temperature between interior East Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula under future climate scenarios. Geophysical Research Letters, 48, e2020GL092031. doi:10.1029/2020GL092031 Open Sky
ARE MULTISEASONAL FORECASTS OF ATMOSPHERIC RIVERS POSSIBLE?
Tseng, K. ‐C., Johnson, N. C., Kapnick, S. B., Delworth, T. L., Lu, F., Cooke, W., … Jia, L. (2021). Are multiseasonal forecasts of atmospheric rivers possible? Geophysical Research Letters, 48, e2021GL094000. doi:10.1029/2021GL094000 Open Sky
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE 2020 NOVEMBER 29 SOLAR ENERGETIC PARTICLE EVENT OBSERVED BY PARKER SOLAR PROBE
Lario, D., Richardson, I. G., Palmerio, E., Lugaz, N., Bale, S. D., Stevens, M. L., … Wiedenbeck, M. E. (2021). Comparative analysis of the 2020 November 29 solar energetic particle event observed by Parker Solar Probe. The Astrophysical Journal, 920, 123. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac157f Open Sky
KINETIC‐SCALE MAGNETIC HOLES INSIDE FORESHOCK TRANSIENTS
Liu, T. Z., Zhang, H., Turner, D. L., Goodrich, K. A., An, X., & Zhang, X. (2021). Kinetic‐scale magnetic holes inside foreshock transients. Journal Of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 126, e2021JA029748. doi:10.1029/2021JA029748 Open Sky
PREDICTING THE MAGNETIC FIELDS OF A STEALTH CME DETECTED BY PARKER SOLAR PROBE AT 0.5 AU
Palmerio, E., Kay, C., Al-Haddad, N., Lynch, B. J., Yu, W., Stevens, M. L., … Lee, C. O. (2021). Predicting the magnetic fields of a stealth CME detected by Parker Solar Probe at 0.5 au. The Astrophysical Journal, 920, 65. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ac25f4 Open Sky
DENDROARCHAEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE TERMINAL WAREHOUSE IN NEW YORK CITY REVEALS A HISTORY OF LONG-DISTANCE TIMBER TRANSPORT DURING THE GILDED AGE
Leland, C., Rao, M. P., Cook, E. R., Cook, B. I., Lapidus, B. M., Staniforth, A. B., … Rodriguez-Caton, M. (2021). Dendroarchaeological analysis of the Terminal Warehouse in New York City reveals a history of long-distance timber transport during the Gilded Age. Journal Of Archaeological Science: Reports, 39, 103114. doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2021.103114 Open Sky
IMPACT OF CYGNSS-DERIVED WINDS ON TROPICAL CYCLONE FORECASTS IN A GLOBAL AND REGIONAL MODEL
Mueller, M. J., Annane, B., Leidner, S. M., & Cucurull, L. (2021). Impact of CYGNSS-derived winds on tropical cyclone forecasts in a global and regional model. Monthly Weather Review, 149, 3433-3447. doi:10.1175/MWR-D-21-0094.1 Open Sky
DIRECT ESTIMATES OF BIOMASS BURNING NOX EMISSIONS AND LIFETIMES USING DAILY OBSERVATIONS FROM TROPOMI
Jin, X., Zhu, Q., & Cohen, R. C. (2021). Direct estimates of biomass burning NOx emissions and lifetimes using daily observations from TROPOMI. Atmospheric Chemistry And Physics, 21, 15569-15587. doi:10.5194/acp-21-15569-2021 Open Sky
PLIOCENE DECOUPLING OF EQUATORIAL PACIFIC TEMPERATURE AND PH GRADIENTS
Shankle, M. G., Burls, N. J., Fedorov, A. V., Thomas, M. D., Liu, W., Penman, D. E., … Hull, P. M. (2021). Pliocene decoupling of equatorial Pacific temperature and pH gradients. Nature, 598, 457-461. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03884-7 Open Sky
MAGNETIC STRUCTURE AND PROPAGATION OF TWO INTERACTING CMES FROM THE SUN TO SATURN
Palmerio, E., Nieves‐Chinchilla, T., Kilpua, E. K. J., Barnes, D., Zhukov, A. N., Jian, L. K., … Sánchez‐Cano, B. (2021). Magnetic structure and propagation of two interacting CMEs from the Sun to Saturn. Journal Of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 126, e2021JA029770. doi:10.1029/2021JA029770 Open Sky
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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. If you go here you can see our latest map of locations where our staff 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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