Earth, actually…

Oops!  Maybe that title is a little misleading… This post is about a speech given by climate scientist Richard Alley.  There is no evidence that Richard Alley himself has any influence on climate, nor would I ever refer to him as a “knob” of any sort. Penn State Cryosphere expert and Two-Mile Time Machine author Richard Alley gave the esteemed [...]

As part of our new “Journal Club” feature series, we’ll be highlighting a scientific journal article and explaining a major concept in Earth science.  This week we start with a recent publication on white roofs by Oleson, et al., from Geophysical Research Letters:

The Obama administration recently announced that funding will be cut for NASA manned-space exploration projects, including a return trip to the moon in 2020.  Instead, more funding will be directed towards NASA Earth-observation and monitoring missions, in hopes of better understanding our planet and its changing climate.  Thinking back over the history of manned space [...]

A new numerical model by the US Geological Survey gives near real-time distributions of the hormone disrupting crop pesticide, atrazine, in drinking water throughout the United States. Atrazine has been banned in the European Union and several other countries as a result of research showing it disrupts endocrine and hormone levels in animals and potentially humans, [...]

Well, not “we” per se, however my PhD advisor, UC Irvine Professor Jay Famiglietti, was a co-author on the recent “Satellite based estimates of groundwater depletion in India” with his former PhD student and current NASA Scientist Matt Rodell.  Also, 2nd author I. Velicogna is on my PhD committee.  (So it’s kind of like I [...]