PAOC Spotlights

Ancient armor

In summer 2007, two geologists armed with rock hammers and a shotgun hiked through the Yukon, looking for fossils. For two weeks, Phoebe Cohen, now a postdoc here in PAOC, and Francis Macdonald, an as...

Wind, war and weathermen

Well into the 20th century, American weather forecasting was not a rigorous science, but an “art,” as a National Research Council report stated in 1918. Forecasters knew, among other things, that weat...

Meet PAOC's Class of 2011

'Tis the graduation season, and although doctoral students defend throughout the year, the Institute's annual Commencement exercices (held last week) bring many back to visit and formally receive thei...

Commencement 2011

It's June. MIT's grounds, already looking spotless thanks to the Insitute's 5 month long MIT 150 celebration and an army of grounds people, are just about perfect. The sun is shining in a clear blue s...

Understanding Climate - Boston Museum of Science

October 12th, 2009 - Boston Museum of Science Senior lecturer, Lodovica Illari, teamed up with co-weather-in-a-tank members Amit Tandon (UMass, Dartmouth) and Amala Mahadaven (BU) to present a selec...

From Trilobites to Extraterrestrials: Exploring Life on Earth and Beyond

October 17th, 2010 - Harvard Natural History MuseumPhoebe Cohen, a post-doctoral associate in Roger Summons Geobiology Lab and the Education and Outreach Coordinator for the MIT NASA Astrobiology Node...

Nautical Night at the MIT Museum

March 11th, 2011 - Nautical Night at the MIT Museum  PAOC staff (Lodovica Illari and John Marshall) and graduate students (Morgan O'Neill, Alli Wing and Mike Byrne) took part in Nautical Night ...

The View from the Top - A Field Trip for First and Second Graders

November 16, 2009 - Cambridge Public Schools "Weather Field Trip", Green Building, MIT A group of first and second graders from the Cambridge Public Schools visited MIT, as part of their study of we...

Telling Your Story

"Telling Your Story Workshop", February 9, 2011 - EPS, Harvard Several PAOC members participated in a "Telling Your Story" Workshop hosted by Phoebe Cohen and others. With the goal of promoting clas...

PAOC Under the Dome

April 30th, 2011 - MIT 150 "Under the Dome"/ Cambridge Science Festival To kick off this year's Cambridge Science Festival, Under the Dome, MIT was a day-long, campus-wide open house intended to sha...

Can we stay? They are demonstrating the Coriolis Force!

May 7th, 2011 - Science Carnival at the Cambridge Public Library/ Cambridge Science FestivalSenior lecturer Lodovica Illari, aided by grad. students Ryan Abernathey and Dan Chavas were among many loca...

PAOC weather forecasting team wins third place in the 2010-2011 WxChallenge

This year PAOC's weather forecasting team placed third in the national collegiate weather forecasting competition, WxChallenge, run by the University of Oklahoma. It was a very tough competition, as w...

Air Pollution Trends and Impacts

Assessing Transportation in the Context of Global Change:"It is a complicated matter mapping the movement of pollution in the atmosphere, but Noelle Eckley Selin models not just the chemistry of the a...

Senior Theses - 2011

Friday, May 13th, was the EAPS annual senior thesis presentation day. Of the eight Course 12 seniors participating, three, Anastasia Maheras, John (Vince) Agard and Todd Mooring, were advised by PAOC ...

2011 Rossby Prize

This year's Rossby Award goes to Brian Rose for his PhD thesis Oceanic control of the sea ice edge and multiple equilibria in the climate system. Brian studied climate dynamics in the Climate Program ...

On the Evolution of "Lovely Crinkly Bits"

When rain falls on sand, very little of it remains on the surface. Rather, most of the water is stored in pore-space as groundwater and only returns to the surface when it flows out of a spring. As gr...

The Postdoc, the Elephant Seal and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

Fabien Roquet, is a postdoc working with Carl Wunsch. He is interested in the oceanic circulation, with a special emphasis on the Southern Ocean, collection and analysis of hydrographic data obtained ...

Archive

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Weather-in-a-Tank Lite - GFD for Middle School

Instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, Saturday mornings this Spring first year grad student Jareth Holt has been heading back in to MIT to teach middle schoolers a little bit of weather and...

Math, Modeling and the Ocean Carbon Cycle Story

 MIT Tech TVDr. Anne Willem Omta is a postdoc. in the ocean biogeochemistry group of Mick Follows. He investigates the factors determining how much carbon is stored in the ocean by means of numer...

Global modeling of HFC-134a concentrations

Matt Rigby models HFC concentrations...

Summer Sail

In 2010, a group of 25 students flew to Bermuda and returned on a 134 foot sailboat to Woods Hole, MA. Each summer, incoming students in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program are invited on a 10-day cruise. As...

Sudden Stratospheric Warmings

Watch a video about the work of graduate student Daniela Domeisen.Domeisen is a 4th year grad. student in the Atmospheric Science Program. Her research seeks to understand "sudden stratospheric warmin...

Laura goes to Harvard Forest

Watch Part I of a video documentary by Ryan Abernathey about co-student Laura Meredith and her work studying the microbial H2 sink in Harvard Forest, Petersham, MA. Laura is a Climate Physics and Chem...

Flight of the Butterly Effect

Read this recent article in MIT's Technology Review magazine, by writer Peter Dizikes, about Lorenz's work and plans for the Lorenz Center being incubated within PAOC.read more...