News

November 27 2010
Food and Water
spotlight
Allison Crimmins in MIT News As the globe’s population increases and people become wealthier, agricultural production will need to likewise increase. But food systems may become more stressed because of a competition for water, a...
November 9 2010
PAOC weather forecasting team wins second place in the 2009-2010 WxChallenge
spotlight
MIT Forecast Team This year PAOC's weather forecasting team won second place in the national collegiate weather forecasting competition, run by the University of Oklahoma. It was a close contest, but unfortunately we w...
November 3 2010
Measuring Moisture
spotlight
Elizabeth Thomson - Spectrum Magazine, MIT PAOC's Dara Entekhabi, leads an international NASA science team set to make the first-ever global observations of soil moisture from space...Soil moisture is of interest to scientists, weather forecas...
November 3 2010
Trapped in Venice Flood
spotlight
Spectrum, MIT Rizzoli, professor of physical oceanography in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), was inspired by the plight of her hometown to devote her professional life to underst...
November 2 2010
IAP 2011
spotlight
PAOC members are offering two for-credit IAP classes in January...Among the for-credit classes offered are:12.312 - Understand and run your own Climate Model given by Paul O'GormanOverviews the fundam...
November 2 2010
DEAPS 2010
spotlight
The EAPS three-day exploration program in Extreme Weather and Climate showcases some of the most interesting and challenging aspects of weather and climate research.webite:http://web.mit.edu/deaps/wea...
October 27 2010
Incense Cedars and Failed Expectations
spotlight
Andrew Barton @ www.callofscience.com How a childhood in the Sierra's helped prime one grad student for a life in the Earth Sciences... Read this recent article by PAOC grad student Andrew Barton (advisor: Mick Follows) at www.callofscien...
October 27 2010
2010 Rossby Prize
spotlight
This year's Rossby Award goes to Daniel Enderton for his PhD thesis "On the meridional heat transport and its partition between the atmosphere and oceans". Daniel studied climate dynamics in the Clima...
October 27 2010
PAOC Undergraduate Courses: 12.003
spotlight
12.003 (Atmosphere, Ocean and Climate Dynamics) is an undergraduate class designed to introduce students to the physics that govern the circulation of the ocean and atmosphere with a focus on the proc...
October 26 2010
Study sees changing intensity of storms from warming
spotlight
MIT News Office - Morgan Bettex PAOC's Paul O'Gorman suggests that hemispheres will respond to climate change differently...In a recent paper Understanding the varied response of extratropical storm tracks to climate change, in PNAS...
October 12 2010
Cruising the Atlantic to trace elemental movements
spotlight
Earth Magazine - Jeremy Jacquot Read about The Trace Metal Group's Fall 2010 North Atlantic cruise; part of the international GEOTRACES program to study trace elements and isotopes in the global ocean. To the right, grad. student Je...
October 7 2010
In the search for Earthlike exoplanets, GJ 436b has much to tell us...
spotlight
MIT News Office - Morgan Bettex Professor Sara Seager and postdoctoral researcher Nikku Madhusudhan have recently completed the first detailed analysis of the atmosphere of a Neptune-sized planet revealing surprisingly low methane l...
October 7 2010
3 Questions: Sara Seager on searching for Earth-like planets
spotlight
MIT News Office - David L. Chandler PAOC planetary scientist discusses projects that aim to discover distant planets similar to our own, and what we can learn when we find them...Professor Sara Seager has been studying exoplanets — plan...
October 7 2010
A Look Back in Time
spotlight
MIT News Office - Morgan Bettex By linking the odd geometry of bacterial growths to photosynthesis, researchers may have a new way to study Earth’s oldest fossils...About 85 percent of the history of life on Earth has been solely mi...
September 30 2010
Mysteries at High Latitudes
spotlight
Oceanus Magazine, WHOI Kjetil Våge, a graduate student in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program, was lead author of a new report showing the surprising return of convection in northern seas in the winter of 2007-8...Read about this 20...
September 30 2010
OCCA: Mapping Observations in a Dynamical Framework
spotlight
MITgcm News ECCO’s newest atlas uses MITgcm as a means of optimally synthesising data within the framework of a physically accurate general circulation model. By also limiting the time-period over which data was ...
September 30 2010
MITjcm - Using the MIT General Circulation Model to Model Jupiter
spotlight
MITgcm News PAOC alum Yohai Kaspi has been using MITgcm to model the atmosphere on a Jupiter-like gas giant...The circulations on the gas giants are quite different from those in Earth’s atmosphere: The flows are...
September 30 2010
Explained: Radiative Forcing
spotlight
MIT News Office - David L. Chandler When there's more energy radiating down on the planet than there is radiating back out to space, something's going to have to heat up. In the first in a series of climate science primers, MIT news spe...
September 30 2010
Wind resistance
spotlight
MIT News Office - Morgan Bettex Researchers suggest generating electricity from large-scale wind farms could influence climate — and not necessarily in the desired way. Professor Ron Prinn and PRS Chien Wang of PAOC speak to MIT New...
September 30 2010
Explained: Climate sensitivity
spotlight
MIT News Office - David L. Chandler If we double the Earth’s greenhouse gases, how much will the temperature change? That’s what this number tells you. In the second part of their "Explained" series on climate change, PAOC researcher An...
September 30 2010
Genes as fossils
spotlight
MIT News Offics - Morgan Bettex Researchers discover the DNA responsible for creating fossil-like molecules found in ancient rocks. PAOC's Roger Summons speaks to MIT News...When exactly did oxygen first appear in Earth’s atmosphere...
September 30 2010
Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill
spotlight
MIT News Office - Morgan Bettex In an interview with MIT news, John Marshall offers a perspective on the spill, why ‘we have never had a spill like this', and what that means for cleanup efforts...More than a month after the tragic ...
September 22 2010
Noelle Selin on curbing mercury
spotlight
Morgan Bettex - MIT News Office As U.N. negotiations begin on a global mercury treaty, PAOC atmospheric scientist Noelle Selin explains the challenges ahead...The first United Nations negotiating session for a global, legally bindin...
September 22 2010
The Aerosols Conundrum
spotlight
Morgan Bettex - MIT News Office Just how much warmer Earth will become as a result of greenhouse-gas emissions — and how much it has warmed since preindustrial times — is much debated. In a 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel o...
September 22 2010
Climate Determinism Revisited
spotlight
MITgcm News Prompted by earlier work using a coupled ocean-atmosphere-sea ice configuration of MITgcm (Rose and Marshall, 2009), David Ferreira, John Marshall and Brian Rose have been probing the model for m...