Director's Weekly Reports

    The Director’s Weekly Reports, although typically circulated before midday every Friday, are often written the day before, particularly in weeks with multiple Friday morning meetings. On such a schedule, important milestones late in the week are often not mentioned until a week later. This week provides several examples of such a pattern.

    The Ocean and Climate Physics Division recently welcomed new Lamont Postdoctoral Fellow Spencer Jones. A physical oceanographer, Spencer holds an undergraduate degree from Oxford University and recently completed his Ph.D. at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, under the supervision of Paola Cessi.

    Today marks the last business day of Columbia University’s fiscal year, and there have been myriad financial, personnel, and associated programmatic issues to address and resolve, particularly for Lamont’s cheerfully hard-working administrative staff. It is well that the coming week includes a Wednesday holiday that will enable long weekends off for many.

    Yesterday, a beautiful late spring day, was Flag Day, and those of us who commuted to Lamont from New York City were greeted en route by a giant American flag hanging from the western tower of the George Washington Bridge.

    The flip of the page on our monthly calendars today reminds us that Lamont Summer Interns will be arriving early next week, in time for a welcoming reception next Tuesday. This summer the program will welcome 28 interns from 19 colleges and universities. The interns will work on research projects supervised by 35 mentors. A list of the interns, their undergraduate institutions, and their mentors follows:

    Commencement events at Columbia University this week marked important milestones for many of our students, notwithstanding the week’s storm fronts and rainfall totals. To all with new degrees, congratulations!

    This week marked the end of classes for the spring semester on Monday, and record-tying to record-breaking high temperatures for the date in Central Park on Wednesday and Thursday (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-03/new-york-ties-record-high-temperature-now-be-ready-for-a-repeat).

     This week has led up to Earth Day 2018 this Sunday (https://www.earthday.org/). In recognition of Earth Day, the campus hosted a Charity Yoga Class on Tuesday – with donations collected for the NYC Fresh Air Fund – and Bike-to-Work events from Manhattan and from Nyack and Piermont this morning. All who joined one of the Bike-to-Work groups were treated to a free breakfast in the Lamont Café. Please join me in thanking Andrew Goodwillie and his co-organizers of Earth Day events as well as the staff of the Lamont Café for their participation.

    This week the local weather has been as volatile as tweets from the White House, with a high temperature of 61°F in Central Park on Sunday, a second spring snowstorm on Monday morning, and high temperatures in the mid-fifties and widespread morning fog on Wednesday.