Lamont Weekly Report, October 9, 2009

Jeff Sachs spent the day on the Lamont Campus on Monday, meeting for two hours with the LDEO ExCom in the morning and then visiting with the leadership of IRI, CIESIN and Tropical Agriculture through the afternoon. This presented a much-welcomed opportunity to engage Jeff in our research goals and resulted in some excellent discussions.

It was great to see Lamont alumnus John Hall on Tuesday and hear his intriguing stories of the development of a hovercraft for research in the ice covered Arctic Ocean. This was an all-too-rare-example of very high-risk innovation in approaches to data collection - a characteristic of our research world that has almost disappeared to zero (but thankfully not quite) since the demise of ONR funding for blue water ocean science.

Thanks to Peter deMenocal and Peter Kelemen we ran a spectacular event at the headquarters of JP Morgan downtown on Wednesday afternoon. Peter and Peter taught a substantial group of JP Morgan clients about the truth of global warming and the importance of thinking about carbon capture and storage. It was very well-done and would have been
impossible without the leadership and dedication of one of our Board members - Michael Cembalest who is a principal at JPM.

My Thursday evening was spent at a dinner in the Low Library to recognize CU's major benefactors - and of course among these folks was Lamont's good friend Gerry Lenfest, who gave the pre-dinner speech. I never miss an opportunity to mingle with such wonderful folks with such deep philanthropic capacity!

Next week is a travel week I am afraid. In DC for four days - a combination of the Ocean Observatories Program Advisory Committee - upon which I sit - and the annual Members and Trustees meetings for the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. Not very exciting stuff, I am afraid - but someone has to do it.

Many congratulations are due to Adam Sobel in the OCP Division - it has just been announced that he is the 2010 recipient of the American Meteorological Society Meisinger Award. The citation reads: "For outstanding contributions to the understanding of the tropical atmosphere, through observational studies and analyses of idealized dynamical models." Many congratulations on this much-deserved honor,
Adam.

I sail my boat to her winter home this weekend and she gets hauled next week - so as far as I am concerned - the summer has ended. Before you know it we will be on the slide from Thanksgiving, thru AGU to the Holidays and the New Year.

But anyway, have a great weekend,

Mike