July 10, 2000

Highlights

• The Project Tomorrow program received a grant award from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to continue its successful Marine Activities Resources and Education (MARE) program. Approximately 40 educators from around the state will participate in a summer training institute August 6-12, 2000. In the fall, Project Tomorrow staff will host a national educators meeting to discuss the scaling up of the MARE program nationally. Faculty or staff interested in getting their local schools involved in MARE should contact Janice at 2-6555 x521.
• Project Tomorrow received a renewal award from the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) to continue to develop on-line lesson plans for middle school students. These lessons focus on using the real-time data from LEO-15 in the classroom.
• Sybil P. Seitzinger has been invited to give a Keynote Talk at The National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, on October 11-13, 2000, at the Symposium on Nutrient Over-enrichment in Coastal Waters: Global Patterns of Cause and Effect.
• The LEO-HyCODE effort begins and promises to bring a summer of fun and adventure. This ONR sponsored effort will result in over 20 institutions (federal, academic, and private companies) joining the summer LEO gang. The focus includes deriving a new generation of ocean color products using a new suite of hyperspectral instruments, biological productivity of upwelling eddies, impact of small scale bottom topography on hydrography, ocean atmosphere coupling, data assimilation and nested ocean forecasting systems. Highlights and updates can be found on the web at the Hy-Times which will be updated throughout the month long experiment. The experiment will climax in night-time bioluminescence studies, dubbed Operation Black Moon, we would say more but would have to kill you. The Hy-Times can be found on the COOL page (http://marine.rutgers.edu/cool).

Meetings Attended

• Jim Miller attended an American Geophysical Union Chapman Conference on the Gaia Hypothesis from June 19 to 22 in Valencia, Spain. The Conference was held at the University of Valencia and was part of the celebration of their 500th anniversary. Jim was one of the co-convenors of the Conference, and he presented a paper entitled "Modeling the feedbacks between water and vegetation in the global climate system."
• Sybil P. Seitzinger and Monica Mazurek gave a presentation at the NJDEP on Friday, June 23, 2000, entitled "Nitrogen Compounds & Airshed Estimates".