ASPB and CIMSS Weekly Report [ Archive ]

IN THE PRESS:

Featured Story on Climate.gov: A featured story appeared on Climate.gov on 10 June, titled "Changes in wind shear accompany shift in latitude where hurricanes reach maximum intensity", summarized the results of a paper led by Jim Kossin (NESDIS/NCDC) that was published in Nature in May. The paper has been discussed in hundreds of news articles and blogs and appeared as a Top News Story on Google's main News page, where it remained for more than 2 days. (J. Kossin, NCDC, 608-265-5356) 

Winter Cloudiness and Summer Sea Ice: The Environmental Research Web (environmentalresearchweb.com) has a news article that describes the results of a recent paper by Yinghui Liu (Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, CIMSS) and Jeff Key (NOAA) (Y. Liu and J. Key, 2014, Less Winter Cloud Aids Summer 2013 Arctic Sea Ice Return from 2012 Minimum, Environ. Res. Lett. 9 044002). The article is available at http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/57541. From the article: "In September 2012, Arctic sea ice extent was the lowest ever recorded. Yet a year later the ice cover was almost 50% higher. To date, there are a number of suspects for causing this variation from year to year – including ice dynamics, ocean and atmospheric heat transport, wind and changes in the Sun. Now a team from the US reckons that unusually low cloud cover in January and February 2013 may have helped the sea ice to recover." (J. Key, E/RA2, 608-263-2605, jkey@ssec.wisc.edu; Y. Liu, CIMSS, 608-265-8620) 

ITEMS FOR THE ADMINISTRATOR:

ITEMS FOR THE ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR:

ITEMS FOR THE OFFICE DIRECTOR, STAR:

Global Cryosphere Watch Meeting in Davos: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW) program held a meeting of two of its teams in Davos, Switzerland, 11-13 June 2014. The CryoNet Team and the Portal Team worked on issues of satellite product intercomparisons and inventories, product metadata, portal interoperability with various data centers and information systems, and a CryoNet site application. Jeff Key (NOAA), a GCW lead, attended the meeting. (J. Key, E/RA2, 608-263-2605, jkey@ssec.wisc.edu) 

Book Published: Jim Kossin (NESDIS/NCDC) is a coauthor on the book Preventing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change. [A. Singh and Z. Zommers (Eds)], published this month. Kossin served as an author on Chapter 2, "The Impact of Climate Change on Natural Disasters". The book represents the culmination of efforts that began with the Global Climate Change Early Warning System Expert Consultation Meeting in November 2010 in Geneva. The meeting was convened by invitation under direction from The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to develop a comprehensive global climate change early warning system together with partners from the UN system and research institutions. The book is available at http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-94-017-8598-3.  (J. Kossin, NCDC, 608-265-5356) 

ITEMS FOR THE DIVISION CHIEF, CoRP:

NOAA Science On a Sphere (SOS) Network Meeting: June 10-12: Nearly 200 researchers, communicators, scientists and evaluators gathered at the Science Museum of Minnesota for the sixth Science On a Sphere (SOS) Network meeting June 10-12. The theme was “Welcome to the Anthropocene: Exploring the role of SOS in illuminating humanity as the driving agent of global change.” The objective of the meeting was to further the collective understanding and use of spherical display technologies for building environmental literacy among global citizens. The Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS), a member of the SOS Network since inception, had two presentations featured at the meeting. (M, Mooney, CIMSS, 608-265-2123) 

ASPB Reduces Inventory of Federal Property Assets: The Advanced Satellite Products Branch (ASPB) responsibly disposed of seventeen (17) excess property assets over the last few weeks. Ten (10) personal computers and smaller external disk drives were re-purposed, and were shipped to various NOAA users, who requested the equipment that was no longer needed by ASPB; the excess machines were shipped to locations as distant as Maryland, Alaska, and Hawaii. Seven (7) other pieces of computer hardware (mostly rack servers or RAIDS (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks)), which were obsolete and of no use, were taken to a local (environmentally compliant) E-recycler and scraped. From a total number of 92 assets in the NOAA “Sunflower” property management system just a few years ago, ASPB has steadily reduced its inventory total down to just 49 items today in June of 2014. (G.S. Wade, E/RA2, 608-263-4743, gary.s.wade@noaa.gov) 

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