Director's Weekly Reports

    Two weeks ago Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, today we await the U.S. landfall of the still stronger Hurricane Irma, and Hurricane Jose is not far behind. The topic of extreme weather is dominating headlines, changing the political landscape in Washington, and prompting broad humanitarian support for those now recovering from a hurricane’s passage.

    For the second week in a row, the extended Lamont community was saddened by the news of the loss of one of our members. Joseph Valenti, who worked in the Observatory’s Buildings and Grounds Department for 24 years from 1979 to 2003, passed away on August 14 (http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/lohud/obituary.aspx?pid=186397227).

    One of the news stories that led off this week was a New York Times article on the most recent draft of the Climate Science Special Report of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/climate/document-Draft-of-the-Climate-Science-Special-Report.html), of which Radley Horton is one of 29 lead authors.

    Every President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has had a science advisor, and this administration has gone longer than most without one. A lengthy article in Eos yesterday (https://eos.org/features/trump-administration-moving-closer-to-picking-science-director?utm_source=eos&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EosBuzz072817) suggests that a science advisor to President Trump may soon be named.

    It doesn’t matter whether you measure your academic summer by the major league baseball schedule or the time between commencement and the start of fall classes. This week we passed the halfway mark.

    Today marks not merely the end of a month but the end of the university’s fiscal year. A blizzard of personnel and financial matters should finally clear for a time, permitting the latest professional and scientific milestones to gain appropriate attention.

    It was the last full week of spring, with high temperatures early in the week to foreshadow the coming season, and a giant American flag draped from the superstructure of the George Washington Bridge on Wednesday to announce to those of us commuting from the city that it was Flag Day.

    This week will be remembered for President Trump’s announcement yesterday that the United States will withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a move that the Editorial Board of The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/trump-paris-climate-change-agreement.html?_r=0) lamented has “dismayed America’s allies, defied the wishes of much of the American business community he pretends to help, threatened America’s competitiveness as well a

     It was Commencement Week at Columbia, and a week that saw a record high temperature for the date yesterday in Central Park and many other locations in the region.