January 8, 2001

Highlights

• Jennifer Francis has been awarded a grant from NSF to study the atmospheric transport of heat and moisture into and within the Arctic from low latitudes using satellite-derived products.
• Robert Chant has been informed that his three year NSF collaborative proposal "Lagrangian studies of mixing and secondary circulation in a stratified channel" will be funded this cycle. Chant will serve as lead PI on the project with Co-PI's Rocky Geyer of WHOI and Bob Houghton of Lamont-Doherty. The project will feature a series of dye injections into the bottom mixed layer of the Hudson River Estuary and include shipboard observations, moored instruments and realistic numerical modeling of the evolving dye distribution.

  The project will be the first to resolve intra-tidal time-scale mixing processes in an estuary with a Lagrangian tracer. A pilot study will take place in May, 2001 consisting of a single injection. Results of the pilot study will guide a series of injections planned for May-June 2002. Injections will occur in a relatively uniform section of the river between the George Washington and Tappan Zee Bridges.

• Mike Crowley and Sage Lichtenwalner visited NBC TV in Philadelphia last week. They have arranged to have daily ocean weather forecasts using the coolroom.org on NBC this summer. They will be making their TV debut Memorial Day weekend....

• Mike Crowley will have a consulting credit on an episode of Criminal Intent, a new NBC series that will debut this fall. He spoke with episode writers on the topic of ocean currents off the Jersey shore. It seems the episode deals with the mafia dumping bodies offshore...

• Judith Weis will be spending the week in Washington, DC at the National Sea Grant Review Panel.

Meetings Attended

• Peter Rona, Karen Bemis, and their collaborators from the Applied Physics Lab/University of Washington, presented 4 papers on acoustic imaging of hydrothermal vents based on their July 2000 cruise to the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the AGU and Deep Submergence Science meetings December 14-19 in San Francisco. One of their posters showing the first acoustic measurements of flow velocities in buoyant hydrothermal plumes is on the wall by the door of IMCS Room 204.
• From Jan. 2 - Jan. 7, Chris Gregg attended the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Meeting in Chicago, IL. He presented a poster at the meeting entitled, "Development of a DNA Probe for the Identification of Early-Stage Mercenaria mercenaria (Hard Clam) Larvae." The coauthors on the poster were Pamela Nelson, Mary Catherine Tucker, and Judy Grassle.

Let's Welcome...

• Carrie Lear has just started a post-doc with Yair Rosenthal, working on the trace element composition of foraminifera with application to paleoceanography and climate change. She has recently finished her Ph.D. in Cambridge and she looks forward to meeting everyone at IMCS.
• IMCS welcomes Jim Ammerman as the new Science Director for the Mid-Atlantic Bight National Undersea Research Center. Most recently, Jim served as an Associate Professor at Texas A&M University and as the Associate Program Director for Biological Oceanography at the National Science Foundation. His research interests include aquatic microbial ecology and biogeochemistry, especially aquatic microbial phosphorous cycling and the molecular biology of phosphorous assimilation in marine microorganisms. He received his Ph. D. in Marine Biology from the University of California at San Diego (Scripps). Please stop by his office (Room 303D, Tel. 2-6555 x339) or lab (Room 310) to welcome him to the Institute. A welcome reception also will be held for Jim in the next few weeks.