September 24, 2001

Highlights

• New Jersey educators Holly Donovan and Tanya Podchaski joined IMCS on Atlantis from 9/16-9/20 as Fred Grassle, Peter Rona, Ken Able, Jim Ammerman, and Mike DeLuca explored the deep sea Hudson Canyon using Alvin. Holly Donovan took Alvin for a spin on 9/19 in the company of Mike DeLuca as they encountered swarming shrimp at the head of the Hudson Canyon. Although previously planned school visits to visit the Atlantis and Alvin in New York City were cancelled, New York and New Jersey schools have been able to keep up with the expedition by checking http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/deepeast01/deepeast01 for Tanya and Holly's lively daily logs from sea.
• There will be a farewell reception for Dr. Barry Komisaruk as he is leaving for two years to be at NIH in Washington. Ann Cali will be acting director of the MBRS program while he is gone.
• Jim Miller and Jennifer Francis have been awarded a 3-year grant from NASA. The project's title is "An Improved GCM Simulation of the Arctic Hydrologic Cycle using Satellite-Derived Products." The goal is to integrate new satellite-derived atmospheric and surface data sets with the NASA GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) GCM to evaluate the realism of the modeled hydrologic balance in the Arctic and seek improvements to inadequate model parameterizations.
• Jennifer Francis, along with colleagues at the University of Washington, has been awarded a 2-year grant by NASA to develop an algorithm to retrieve cloud properties over snow- and ice-covered surfaces from satellite data. The project will make use of a 20-year record (1979 to 1998) of radiances from NOAA polar orbiting satellites. The resulting data set will be used for a wide variety of climate-oriented investigations.

Meetings Attended

• Peter Rona and Karen Bemis participated in the NSF RIDGE Program Endeavour Seafloor Observatory Results Workshop at the University of Washington held in Seattle, 24-26 September, where they presented an overview and four posters on the results of their acoustic imaging experiments at that observatory with collaborators Darrell Jackson and Chris Jones (Applied Physics Lab, UW), Kyohiko Mitsuzawa (JAMSTEC) and Dave Palmer (NOAA/AOML).

IMCS in the News

• The Record featured Fred Grassle on August 17, in a piece called "Rutgers team is going deep: Scientists to explore canyon in Atlantic".
  On August 23, The Star Ledger featured Gordon Hendler of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, a marine biologist trained at Rutgers, in a piece entitled "Starry Eyed: Lucent Technologies has discovered the brittlestar, a blind sea creature without a brain, uses inorganic crystals as nearly perfect optical microlenses".
• On August 25, The Herald News featured Norbert Psuty in a piece entitled "Rutgers Professor Finds Truth in the Sands of Time".
• On August 30, The Bridgeton Evening News, featured IMCS' Deep East Hudson Canyon Expedition in the Outdoors column.
• On September 21, the Rutgers Focus featured Rich Lutz and Peter Rona in an articled called "Its a wrap: Researchers film mysteries two miles below ocean surface".
• On September 25, The Daily Targum featured Rich Lutz and the upcoming IMAX film "Voyage Into the Abyss" in an article called "Grant assists to make film".