European Geophysical Society General Assembly, Vienna, Austria
May 21, 2008
Dr. Robert Cahalan gave three talks at the European Geophysical Society General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, during the week of April 13, entitled "Apparent Bluing of Aerosols Near Clouds," "The Lunar Borehole Experiment," and "Modeling the Wavelength and Time Dependence of Solar Forcing of Earth's Climate." These talks were given in sessions on "Atmospheric Sciences," "Climate, Past, Present and Future," and "Solar-Terrestrial Sciences," respectively. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center scientists also gave talks in several other sessions, including "Biogeosciences," "Cryospheric Sciences," and others.

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SORCE Mission Results Highlighted
May 21, 2008
SORCE mission results were highlighted on the NASA.gov frontpage in a recent press release and video entitled "Solar Variability: Striking a Balance with Climate Change" which can be viewed here. The article and video features comments by the SORCE PI Thomas Woods, from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at University of Colorado, and the SORCE Project Scientist Robert Cahalan, and Deputy Project Scientist Douglas Rabin, of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. The article describes the role of solar forcing in the context of global warming of recent decades and coming decades, and also highlights future sun-climate missions such as Glory, and TSIS. TSIS, the Total and Spectral Irradiance Sensor, will be the primary follow-on to SORCE, carrying two SORCE instuments (TIM and SIM) onboard the first or "C1" mission of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), thus making TSIS the first climate mission that will be transitioned from NASA's Earth Observing System to NPOESS longterm operations. (CERES is also expected to make this transition.) The PI of TSIS is Peter Pilewskie, of the University of Colorado's LASP. More on Sun-Climate can be found at Goddard's Sun-Climate Web. Full Story

MODIS Workshop Held in India
May 15, 2008
Climate & Radiation Branch members Richard Kleidman (SSAI), Robert Levy(SSAI), S.K. Satheesh (ORAU Senior Fellow) and Lorraine Remer taught a workshop on how to acquire and use MODIS data. The workshop was held May 12-15 in Dehra Dun India, at the foot of the Himalayas. The class of 25 participants represent graduate students and scientists from academic and government institutions all over India. These 25 participants were selected from an initial pool of over 400 applicants. Full Story