Lamont Weekly Report, October 22, 2010

Another meeting-filled week - 8-10 per day Monday through Wednesday - highlights running the gamut between finalizing decisions about the science writer to replace Kim Martineau, to entertaining the new Executive Director of AGU Chris McEntee on Wednesday afternoon.  Ms McEntee is impressive - it will be interesting to see how her leadership will reshape AGU going forward.

Thursday was a day trip to DC - a meeting of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. The new Division Director for Ocean Sciences, David Conover, gave a generally optimistic look into the future - happy with the ten percent increase that he will be receiving for FY11 (when the continuing resolution ends that is!), and pretty positive beyond that.  He quoted some interesting numbers on the outcomes of the Climate Energy and Sustainability Initiative. In Ocean acidification they received 118 proposals and funded 22 (18.6%), in Biodiversity it was 195 received, 14 funded (7.1%), in Water it was 185/16 (8.6%), and finally they received 135 proposals in decadal and regional climate but have not yet finished the decision-making. He placed a lot of emphasis upon the new program for 2011 - Science, Energy and Education for Sustainability. However, the most positive presentation of the day was from Mike Freilich - head of NASA Earth Sciences. With the abandonment of the manned moon program substantial new resources are being directed back into Earth
Sciences, and major new resources (as in many tens of $M) are promised for university based research.

Today I spent mostly getting ready of my trip west - I leave for San Diego tomorrow - there are meetings of the Langseth Oversight Committee Sunday, Monday and Tuesday - I will be travelling back on Wednesday.  The only good part of this trip is that I will get to see Langseth - she is alongside at the Scripps facility as we evaluate bids from shipyards for the maintenance work that will be carried out over the next few months.

The Jardetsky Lecture this afternoon was, as usual, a great success. For the first time we had a card-carrying physical oceanographer as the speaker - Steve Rintoul from CSIRO in Australia.  A great talk and a great reception afterwards.

Have a good weekend - sadly I will be spending a large part of tomorrow in a plane, but hopefully San Diego will be its usual sunny self.

Mike