PAOC Spotlights

Got Weather? PAOC on the Weather Channel

Grad student Vince Agard recently met with a film crew from the Weather Channel. Here he is, explaining how the Earth's rotation contributes to severe weather......

Digital Computing for the Atmosphere, Oceans and Climate

Chris Hill's work centers on how digital computing technology in its broadest sense applies to Earth science and especially the ocean. Computing in general has a long and proud history ...

Ocean-borne Garbage Pulls a Crowd

Oceans at MIT goes to the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival...  Ocean scientists from MIT’s Program in Oceans, Atmospheres, and Climate as well as EAPS department undergraduates headed over to th...

A ‘green’ Sahara was far less dusty than today

 As recently as 5,000 years ago, the Sahara — today a vast desert in northern Africa, spanning more than 3.5 million square miles — was a verdant landscape, with sprawling vegetation and numerous...

Forging a New Direction in Climate Research

In this Faculty Forum Online broadcast, Professor Kerry Emanuel ’76, PhD ’78 discussed a new approach to climate science that emphasizes basic understanding over black box simulation. R...

Cumulus, cirrus, stratus: what clouds say about climate change

In this recent Faculty Forum broadcast event, Dan Cziczo set out to answer what happens when particles in the atmosphere, especially manufactured ones, interact with water vapor and temperature to for...

Susan Solomon Wins Vetlesen Prize

Atmospheric chemist, Susan Solomon, who led efforts to identify the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole and a French geochemist who extracted the longest-yet climate record from polar ice cores hav...

Groundwater: The River No One Sees

MIT WHOI Joint Program graduate student Meagan Gonneea is a chemical oceanographer interested in groundwater. Groundwater that enters the coastal ocean from underground aquifers carries nutrients and ...

Searching for Climate Clues in Southern Ocean Eddies

DIMES researchers hope that their data on ocean mixing may provide the missing ingredients to ocean climate models... which can then be used to understand past climates, as well as make projections ab...

Sea-Ice Interplay

In this MIT News video, Patrick Heimbach describes his work and the discovery of a feedback between sea ice and ocean that has helped improve Arctic ice extent forecasting.The simulation was conducted...

Measuring Martian Snowflakes

Graduate student Renyu Hu is interested in a range of planetary science problems from characterizing terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres and surfaces to analyzing Mars orbiter data.In this vid...

Watching the Arctic Melt - Adventures in Polar Oceanography

The top of the world is warming. The ice cap is in retreat... What's happening? How do we know? Why does it matter? These were just some of the questions raised at last week's mini-conference 'Watchin...

Curious About Life

Professor of Geobiology Roger Summons talks to Astrobiology Magazine about his work with SAM, NASA's Sample Analysis at Mars Prioject. The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover has 10 science i...

2nd Annual Carlson Lecture

Predicting Climate in a Chaotic World: How Certain Can We Be? NEW ENGLAND AQUARIUM, NOVember 1, 2012This year's John Carlson Lecture was given by Royal Society Professor of Climate Physics at UK...

Clearing the Air

 Atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon finds hope in past environmental challenges.Atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon finds hope in past environmental challenges.Read more at MIT News...

Greenland Melting? Three Questions with Patrick Heimbach

The surface of Greenland’s interior ice sheet experienced a period of extreme melting for several days during July, 2012. Oceans at MIT sat down with Patrick Heimbach, to discuss the ice melt event.Re...

Power in Modeling Virtual Marine Microbes

When used properly, models provide valuable insights into complex systems and sometimes yield surprising, even counterintuitive outcomes. Darwin Project researcher Stephanie Dutkiewicz explains her gr...

DEAPS Extreme Weather and Climate 2012

The program began on Wednesday, August 22 with a lunch at which the participants were given an introduction to the activities planned for the next few days, and also got to meet several EAPS faculty. ...

Study maps pollution’s pathway to the Arctic, sets path for future research

Noelle Selin and Carey Friedman have built a model that will be further developed as part of an NSF-funded project to track how chemicals get to remote Arctic environments. Read more at MIT News...

When it Rains, it Pours

Global warming is expected to intensify extreme precipitation, but the rate at which it does so in the tropics has remained unclear. A new study authored by Paul O'Gorman provides an estimate based on...

Oceans Online

John Marshall and the Oceans at MIT team, pull together all things "ocean" to create a new cross-campus website. Immerse yourself in this new resource for what is going on at MIT and within the MIT-WH...

The Mathematics of Leaf Decay

Understanding the rate at which leaves decay can help scientists predict the global flux of carbon dioxide, and develop better models for climate change. A new mathematical model from postdoc Dav...

Geotraces: Building a Periodic Table for the Ocean

Ed Boyle’s research group works on trace metals and trace metal isotope ratios in the oceans, estuaries, rivers, and ice cores. In this Oceans at MIT article, you can read about the team's involvemen...

The 2012 PAOC Retreat: South Yarmouth, MA

The 2012 PAOC retreat was held at the Red Jacket Resort in South Yarmouth, MA, on beautiful Cape Cod over the weekend of October 12-14.The faculty, graduate students, post-docs and staff of MIT’s Prog...

Exploring the Arctic

Temperatures in the Arctic region has been rising at approximately twice the global average rate in the past 100 years (Solomon et al., Technical Summary, IPCC 2007).  To understand the effect of...