PAOC Spotlights

Food and Water

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...

PAOC weather forecasting team wins second place in the 2009-2010 WxChallenge

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...

Measuring Moisture

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...

Trapped in Venice Flood

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...

IAP 2011

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...

DEAPS 2010

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...

Incense Cedars and Failed Expectations

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...

2010 Rossby Prize

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...

PAOC Undergraduate Courses: 12.003

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...

Study sees changing intensity of storms from warming

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...

Cruising the Atlantic to trace elemental movements

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...

In the search for Earthlike exoplanets, GJ 436b has much to tell us...

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...

3 Questions: Sara Seager on searching for Earth-like planets

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...

A Look Back in Time

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...

Mysteries at High Latitudes

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...

OCCA: Mapping Observations in a Dynamical Framework

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 ...

MITjcm - Using the MIT General Circulation Model to Model Jupiter

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...

Explained: Radiative Forcing

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...

Wind resistance

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...

Explained: Climate sensitivity

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...

Genes as fossils

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...

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

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 ...

Noelle Selin on curbing mercury

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...

The Aerosols Conundrum

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...

Climate Determinism Revisited

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...