Urban Climate Modeling
April 27, 2005
Urban modeling has recently received increasing attention in climate change studies and in climate model development. A paper by Menglin Jin (UMD) and J. Marshall Shepherd (NASA) in the May 2005 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society indicates that NASA EOS observations, in particular, skin temperature, leaf area index, surface albedo and emissivity, aerosol, and cloud information from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite, are extremely useful in better representing urban land properties in land surface models coupled with global or regional climate models. An urban model using these remote sensing data has been developed in the Branch and will be implemented in the NASA Goddard Modeling and Assimilation OfficeÕs (GMAO) land surface model. Full Story

Upcoming SORCE Meeting on Paleo Connections Between Sun, Climate, and Culture
April 18, 2005
The 3rd SORCE Science Meeting will be held September 14-16, 2005 in Durango, Colorado. The meeting will concentrate on connections between solar variability and paleoclimate, and culture. Results will be presented from the 4 instruments onboard SORCE (TIM, SIM, Solstice, and XPS). Full Story

Hydrologic Cycle Ñ Fresh Water Availability in the U.S.
April 12, 2005
Science and Technology to Support Fresh Water Availability in the United States, a report of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Committee on Environment and Natural Resources (CENR), Subcommittee on Water Availability and Quality, was recently released. Full Story