NOAA Cooperative Institutes are academic and non-profit research institutions that demonstrate the highest level of performance and conduct research that supports NOAA’s Mission Goals and Strategic Plan. Because many Cooperative Institutes are collocated with NOAA research laboratories, there is a strong, long-term collaboration between scientists in the laboratories and in the university. Cooperative Institutes not collocated with a NOAA laboratory often serve diverse research communities and research programs throughout NOAA. Cooperative Institutes serve an additional important function: they help educate and train the next generation of NOAA’s and the nation’s scientific workforce. Many of the cooperative agreements between NOAA and our academic partners provide for formal NOAA sponsorship of students through fellowships.
Currently, NOAA supports 21 Cooperative Institutes in 17 states.[more]ACTIVITIES & ANNOUNCEMENTS
CIRES Researcher on Cruise for Carbon Science
Why go to one of the windiest latitudes on Earth to learn about future global warming? Scientists from around the U.S., including CIRES' Ludovic Bariteau, are embarking on a 6-week research cruise to make groundbreaking measurements that will ultimately help increase our understanding how large amounts of climate-affecting gases move between atmosphere and sea, and vice-versa. Ludovic will write about his research and his experience on the cruise in weekly posts.
HOT ITEMS
CIFAR Provides Alaskan Input to Climate Change Synthesis Report
The leadership of the Climate Change Science Program, in coordination with the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Council on Environmental Quality, has called for an integrative report, or Unified Synthesis Product that provides a coherent analysis of the current understanding of climate change in the United States. Dr. John Walsh, Director of the Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research (CIFAR), has been appointed to the Synthesis Product Development Committee, established by NOAA and tasked with producing the report by the end of 2008. The committee held its first meeting in Chicago on March 31-April 1, 2008. [more]
CICS/Princeton Research Highlights Northern Hemisphere-Southern Ocean Climate Link
Surface warming in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly amplified at high latitudes, could reduce the formation of cold, deep water (primarily in the North Atlantic), significantly altering the oceans' ability to moderate global climate variability and change. This is the conclusion of Neven S. Fuckar at NOAA's Cooperative Institute for Climate Science at Priceton University and NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, whose research appears in the July 24, 2007 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. [more]
JISAO Researchers Offer New Insights into Productivity of Coastal Gulf of Alaska
Researchers at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) and NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, have developed a coupled physical-biological computer model to explain how the coastal Gulf of Alaska supports such large populations of fish, seabirds and marine mammals, despite ecological conditions that would suggest otherwise. [more]
JIMO Researchers Contribute Significant Advances to Fire Danger Rating System
Recent research by scientists at the Joint Institute for Marine Observations (JIMO) and the Experimental Climate Prediction Center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has led to substantial improvements in the National Fire Danger Rating System, a tool widely used by land management agencies in the United States for fire management applications such as prevention and pre-suppression planning. [more]
JIMAR Researchers Develop New Method to Track Marine Creatures
Researchers with the Pelagic Fisheries Research Program at the University of Hawaii – Manoa’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (JIMAR) have developed a new method to estimate the most probable track of geographic positions (geolocations) of marine creatures directly from a series of light measurements recorded by archival tags. The new method does this without either making any light-level threshold assumptions or constraining the movement of the tag between dawn and dusk. [more]
CIRES Study Detects Large Methane Emissions over Amazon
Earth’s largest tropical rainforest is emitting much larger volumes of methane into the atmosphere than was previously estimated, according to a field study led by John B. Miller at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory. [more]
NGI Conducts Sensitivity Studies on Hurricane Katrina's Storm Surge
In collaboration with the NOAA Hurricane Research Division and the NOAA National Weather Service Meteorological Development Laboratory, the Northern Gulf Institute (NGI) is performing sensitivity tests using hydrodynamic models to understand the factors that contributed to Hurricane Katrina’s historic storm surge in August 2005. Katrina’s surge is unprecedented in the U.S. for its elevation, area coverage, and levee breaches. [more]
MicroMet Drives CIRA Contribution to International Polar Year
A high-resolution meteorological distribution model – MicroMet – developed by researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University is being used to support the 2007-2008 International Polar Year (IPY) – an international coordinated campaign of research in the Polar Regions. [more]
CIMMS Researchers Work with Public to Document Hail Size Occurrence
Researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) at the University of Oklahoma and NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) are working with the public to document hail size occurrence during severe weather events in central Oklahoma this spring. The Hail Size Discrimination Experiment (HaSDEx) calls upon volunteers of any age and education level (including teachers, families, and classes) to safely observe and report hail size when hail occurs in their areas. [more]
