This week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued their State of the Climate for calendar 2014. The year set many records, according to the report, including average surface temperature, average sea surface temperature, and mean sea level (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/07/16/science/ap-us-sci-climate-checkup.html). Suzana Camargo was a contributing author to the NOAA report.
This was also the last week at Lamont for Rachel Roberts, who leaves Lamont after nearly three years as Senior Program Analyst in the Observatory’s Research Management department. Next week, Rachel will begin a new position as a Program Associate at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City. On Tuesday I joined Kathy Callahan, Miriam Cinquegrana, Kuheli Dutt, Art Lerner-Lam, Edie Miller, Pat O’Reilly, and Bev Wuerfel at The ‘76 House for a lunch at which we thanked Rachel for her many contributions to financial analysis and budget planning at Lamont.
The R/V Langseth remained at SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx this week. We took advantage of this month’s extended port stay to arrange a tour of the ship on Thursday for several members of Lamont’s Advisory Board and for a number of colleagues at the Earth Institute and the Observatory. Guided by Sean Higgins and Paul Ljunggren in two tour groups, the visitors to our ship included Board members Walter Brown, Pat Daly, Jeffrey Gould, Bob Kay, Larry Lynn, and Julian Sproule, along with Greg Fienhold, Jennifer Genrich, Anna Jump, and Natalie Unwin-Kuruneri from the Earth Institute, and Karen Buck, Dave Goldberg, Art Lerner-Lam, Yvette Matos-Gooding, Stacy Morford, Stacey Vassallo, and me from Lamont.
On Thursday, Ajit Subramaniam – a former program officer at the National Science Foundation and more recently the Moore Foundation – led a workshop on “Writing proposals for NSF” aimed at Lamont’s postdoctoral scientists. Attending the workshop were 29 of our postdoctoral scientists and four of our Associate Research Scientists.
Eos, the newsletter of the American Geophysical Union, ends the week with two Lamont-related stories highlighted with accompanying photos on Eos Buzz (https://www.magnetmail.net/actions/email_web_version.cfm?recipient_id=1031127154&message_id=10583612&user_id=AGU_&group_id=2129283&jobid=28787081). There is a Research Spotlight article on the recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters by Park Williams, Richard Seager, and Ben Cook attributing reductions in morning fog levels and increases in the base heights of stratus clouds in southern California, important for controlling the temperature and water budget of the lower atmosphere, to increased urbanization of the area (https://eos.org/research-spotlights/urbanization-threatens-drought-reducing-clouds-in-california). And a story on the U.S. academic research fleet and the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) that manages the coordination of ships and related facilities leads off with a photo of the Langseth (https://eos.org/project-updates/a-university-government-partnership-for-oceanographic-research).
Lamont’s own web page this week gained a detailed and video-accompanied story, by Kevin Krajick and David Funkhouser, on the work of Lex van Geen, Ben Bostick, Tyler Ellis, Sara Flanagan, Brian Mailloux from Barnard, and their colleagues at the Mailman School, on the distribution and consequences of naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater in Bangladesh and other east Asian nations (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/battling-largest-mass-poisoning-history). Because groundwater is the major source of drinking water in the area, levels of arsenic in water from many wells in rural areas that are 10 to 100 higher than allowable standards pose a major challenge to public health.
A second web story this week, also by Kevin Krajick, highlights a recent article in PLOS ONE by Steve Chillrud, Beizhan Yan, Martin Stute, and colleagues from the Mailman School and the University of Pennsylvania that documents increased rates of hospitalization in two Pennsylvania counties in which hydraulic fracturing operations are ongoing (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/news-events/hospitalizations-increase-near-fracking-sites-study-shows). No causal link has been firmly established, but a control study in a third county where no hydrofracking is being conducted found no such increase. Steve and Beizhan are carrying out related studies of air and water quality in areas in Pennsylvania in which hydrofracking is planned or ongoing.
As temperatures warm this weekend, may we all be thankful that we can quench our thirsts with New York drinking water (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/wotg.shtml).
Sean