Director's Weekly Reports

Last Sunday we held a successful Alumni Association Board Meeting and lunch, along with a several of the Observatory's special friends, before Greg Mountain's great lecture at the second Spring Public lecture event - again to a capacity crowd in the Monell Auditorium. I had to leave early from the reception to get down to Newark airport in time to catch a plane to Houston with Dave Goldberg, rolling in to College Station substantially after midnight. So Monday was spent talking with the TAMU folks and with Ocean Leadership about how to keep the Ocean Drilling Program thriving and successful, through these difficult times of rocketing fuel costs and decreasing NSF support. After losing Tuesday to the return trip from Texas, and Wednesday to day-long interview sessions with a candidate for our new Academic Affairs and Diversity position, and Thursday morning to a very educational visit to the Liberty Science Center (to talk about a possible MoU), Friday arrived  - the pinnacle of which was the annual budget meeting with Provost Brinkley - always a positive joy.

Langseth arrived in port in Costa Rica this week - at the end of her first two legs of science operations for Steve Holbrook - which were by all accounts highly successful - absolutely fabulous data from the 8 km long streamer.

Last Sunday was the first in this year's series of Spring Public Lectures. Terry Plank was the speaker and the Monell auditorium was absolutely packed on a beautiful sunny afternoon. As you know last season we started charging a $5 entry fee and requesting advance bookings in order to try to reduce the difficult and embarrassing over flow crowds that we had experienced - but still we are experiencing getting capacity crowds - which of course is absolutely wonderful!  
And Terry's talk was fabulous - a very tough subject - the role of the earth's interior in the global water cycle - but she made it fun and exciting, up to and including spraying the Director with an effervescing soda bottle.

We hosted the editor of Columbia magazine and the CU Exec VP for Communications for separate visits this week, so we are certainly up-to-speed on all things related to the CU publicity machine!

We started the first round of interviews for applicants for the new position in the Director's Office - Assistant Director for Academic Affairs and Diversity; and we made significant progress with decisions regarding this year's Post Doc Fellows program. So far we have made three offers - two were accepted and one declined and I am working, as we speak, on making one more offer.

After being out of the office last week I was playing catchup through Wednesday, when I had to go back down to DC.  The reason was to participate in a roundtable at NSF - tasked with defining research priorities in sustainable development. This was led by the Earth Institute - in particular by John Mutter and Jeff Sachs - but the attendees were (by design) predominantly non-CU, including luminaries like Bill Clark from Harvard and Steve Schneider from Stanford. The  
goal was to make the case that at the heart of sustainable development is a set of hard-core researchable basic research questions.  There was superb discussion at a very high level - but the determination of success will depend on how good a job we can do of writing up the report - and there is a short fuse on this because to have maximum impact we want to get the report into the system prior to a high-level retreat of NSF upper management scheduled for April.

The week began with an interesting day over in Lamont Hall spent discussing marine mammal research priorities and opportunities with a group from NSF and the oil industry. We met Jim Holik (a Lamont graduate - Phil Rabinowitz
student) who has taken the critically important program manager position at NSF that used to be Sandy Shor. He will be the key contact for us in the future for running Langseth science operations.

On Monday I also met with the CU Senate sub committee on Officers of Research to talk about our Research Professor plan - that was also a very useful and constructive meeting.

The Langseth returned to Galveston Tuesday after a very successful  cruise collecting high bandwidth source signature data on the new airgun arrays. She sails for Costa Rica on Saturday and begins a full  schedule of challenging operations through 2008. The crew and all the  technicians on the ship, as well as everyone back here in the marine  department continue to perform at herculean levels, facing up to, and  overcoming, the challenges involved with bringing such a huge and  complex machine - that is a multi-streamer seismic boat - to full  operational status.

Wednesday afternoon was spent with the Lamont Advisory Board - a  particularly good meeting - in which some important decisions were  made - and stimulated by a great science talk by Doug Martinson. The  board wants to provide some funds directly to Lamont researchers to  help 'seed' new and innovative research projects. The amounts of money  will be small to start, but I think it will grow.  I will send out an  a formal announcement next week that lays out the selection criteria  etc that will be used for disbursement of these funds.  The money is  coming from direct donations from the Board members themselves, so  they feel truly invested in the project.

Having ExCom and a Faculty on the same day (like today) is just not good for my constitution, so I will talk about something else... Just as LDEO led the world in bringing multichannel seismics to academic research three decades ago, so we have again attained a first (as far as I know) of being the first academic general purpose research vessel to tow multiple hydrophone streamers (enabling practical collection of 3D data sets). A couple of days ago R/V Marcus G. Langseth had three 6km long hydrophone streamers deployed, towing them successfully a few tens of meters apart, and learning the many challenges of rigging and ship handling. It will be a steep learning curve for us in the coming months as we bring this new capability to the academic community. The goal was to deploy four streamers - we did not make that - the weather in the Gulf (and the reliability of the weather forecasts) has been very poor over the last couple of weeks so we lost many days of working time.

I flew out to Bermuda on Tuesday to spend three days with the leaders of ocean institutions from around the world. The unusual ten-year- old international entity hosting this meeting (Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean - POGO) is working to play a bigger role in the planning for GEOSS (Global Earth Observing). The breadth of international representation was impressive - Director-level folks from fifteen different nations, plus many government representatives. The meeting exceeded expectations (mine at least) with regard to the substance of the dialog, and was an 'eye-opener' with regard to the level of coastal and ocean observation activity world-wide. It was something of a novelty to hear the representative from the Chinese Academy of Sciences defining the direct economic benefit of multi- million dollar investments in coastal monitoring, impressive to hear the British describe the operational predictions from models assimilating observations in real time from the Irish Sea, and the six or seven decades of data from Plymouth's Continuous Plankton Recorder program, though seen before, never cease to make the case strongly for sustained programs of careful and systematic ocean observations. All this as Tony Knapp announced that NSF had decided discontinue funding for the Bermuda Test Bed mooring after 13-14 years of operation...