From all of us at the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, we hope you have a joyous holiday season!
Thank you to everyone who joined us at this year’s Okubofest! The event offered a chance for SoMAS students, faculty, and staff to socialize and sample homebrewed beverages while raising money for the Okubo Scholar to visit in the Spring semester.
Congratulatons to Dr. Sara Cernadas-Martin, who was a finalist for the Stony Award for Nurturing a Welcoming, Inclusive Campus Culture. Sara is a SoMAS alum who currently serves as the Water Quality Program Manager for the Peconic Estuary Partnership and previously served as co-chair of the SoMAS Committee of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Congratulations to the winners of the Evan Frankel Memorial Scholarship! This $2000 scholarship is designed to allow the recipient to participate in a marine science extracurricular activity that might have otherwise been out of reach. The recipients will use the award to join the Jamaica Study Abroad program this winter:
- Sydney Sherbitsky
- Paxton Easton
- Natalia Valencia Jimenez
- Madeline Smyth
Congratulations to our graduate students that successfully presented their thesis and dissertation work this semester!
MS Thesis Presentations:
- Madeleine Foley, Spatial and temporal predictability of habitat drive foraging movements of coastal birds
- Allegra Ervin, Bayesian Stochastic Stock Reduction Analysis as a Data-Limited Approach to Assess Historical Populations of Exploited Fisheries
- Bradley McGuire, The Ability of North Atlantic Bivalves to Filter Feed and Accumulate Toxins from the Harmful Algae, Dinophysis acuminata
- Celia Werner, Evolution and Environmental Controls of Area Updraft Proxies in QLCSs Observed in PERiLS-2022
- Geresa-Leigh Luke, Thermal Tolerance in Juvenile Winter Flounder in Northeastern United States Coastal Waters
- Miles Litzmann, The Observed Relationship Between Radar Proxies of Midlevel Updrafts and Low-level Mesocyclones, and Their Connection to Tornado Formation & Intensity in Supercells
- Jason Mueller, Mapping the Seabed Sediment of Oyster Bay Harbor, NY to Analyze the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Shellfish Dredging
PhD Dissertation Defenses:
- Brandyn Lucca, Theoretical and empirical broadband target strength measurements can improve target classification and density estimates of epi- and mesopelagic fish and zooplankton.
- Kristofer Tuftedal, Climatologies of Convection Across the United States
- Megan Ladds, The role of zooplankton grazing in altering plankton community diversity during harmful algal blooms.
- Rui Zhang, Life Cycles of Baroclinic Waves in the Framework of Local Finite-Amplitude Wave Activity
- Cong Cao, Characterization of Volatile Organic Compounds from urban and suburban regions in New York State
Dr. Roy Price and Co-PI Tim Glotch have received a new award from NASA Goddard, in support of the project “Habitability Estimates for Heterotrophic Metabolisms in Wet-to-Dry Transient Environments on Noachian Mars (HabMars)”, in the amount $1,133,142, for the project period 10/10/2023 – 10/09/2026.
Numerous lines of evidence suggest that during the early Noachian Period, the surface of Mars had an ocean and may have been habitable. Evidence also indicates that about 3 billion years ago there was a global climate shift, likely accompanied by episodic cycling of wet-to-dry and freeze-thaw conditions. Thus, ancient Mars provides an excellent location to investigate the ongoing climate shift on Earth. If there was life on early Mars, or just robust organic carbon cycling without life, it suggests that Noachian Mars could have been habitable for heterotrophic life. How would habitability have changed through this global climate shift, as Mars froze and dried, becoming the cold desert it is today?
This proposal is focused on organic compound cycling in Iceland lake and marine environments, which are well established as Mars analogues since they also maintain water-rock reactions of basalt. We will evaluate wet-to-dry/freeze-thaw cycling conditions that mimic global climate change of 1) sediments from several lake environments in Iceland, including the dried up lake bed of Hagavatn, and Lake Kleifarvatn, which has ongoing hydrothermal activity, 2) hydrothermal vent precipitates composed of saponite from the Strytan Hydrothermal Field, Eyjafjord, northern Iceland, which have been shown to trap organic compounds, and 3) existing experimental hydrothermal precipitates, including saponite and nontronite clays amended with organic compounds during growth. Once samples have been collected, they will be carefully homogenized and then comprehensively characterized for organic inventory.
To test the fate of organics during wet-to-dry/freeze-thaw cycles, samples will be placed in a Mars Environmental Cycling Simulation Chamber (MECS), to be built at the SoMAS, which will mimic the characteristics of early Mars atmosphere, temperatures, and pressures through the global climate change. MECS experiments will last for +2 and +6 months; after each of these time steps samples will again be evaluated for OC compound type and concentration using the same instrument suite as for T=0 samples.
At the heart of this proposal is the assumption that predictions of Gibbs energy can be used as a proxy for understanding the habitability of an environment. We will conduct energy yield calculations for heterotrophic metabolisms using data from each time point, allowing us to quantitatively evaluate the changes in habitability across a global climate transition.
SBU News Features
- Kevin Reed Joins National Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate
- Stony Brook University 2023 in Photos features Earthstock and CommUniversity Day
Latest Seminar Videos
- Arnoldo Valle-Levinson, OSAC 2023-12-01 “When talking about coastal vulnerability… also think of the Sun and the Moon“
- Michael Riemer, TAOS 2023-12-06 “Limits of Predictability – Insights From The Perspective of Atmospheric Dynamics“
Latest Publications
Weisberg, S. J., Pershing, A. J., Grigoratou, M., Mills, K. E., Fenwick, I. F., Frisk, M. G., … & Nye, J. A. (2024). Merging trait‐based ecology and regime shift theory to anticipate community responses to warming. Global Change Biology, 30(1), e17065.
Vieten, R., Warken, S. F., Winter, A., Scholz, D., Zanchettin, D., Black, D., & Lachniet, M. (2023). A sequence of abrupt climatic fluctuations in the north-eastern Caribbean related to the 8.2 ka event. The Holocene, 09596836231211874.
Postec, A., Galès, G., Prime, A. H., Bartoli, M., Price, R. E., Vandecasteele, C., & Erauso, G. (2023). Marinitoga aeolica sp. nov., a novel thermophilic anaerobic heterotroph isolated from a shallow hydrothermal field of Panarea Island in the Aeolian archipelago, Italy. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, 73(11), 006186.
Si, W., Liu, H., & Zhang, M. (2023). Ocean Dynamics Causes the Equatorial Pacific SST Bias in CAS‐ESM2‐0. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 128(22), e2023JD039593.
Lucca, B. M., Ressler, P. H., & Warren, J. D. (2023). Target strength measurements of individual sub-Arctic krill have frequency-dependent differences from scattering model predictions. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 154(5), 3374-3387.
Wethington, M., Gonçalves, B. C., Talis, E., Şen, B., & Lynch, H. J. Species classification of Antarctic pack‐ice seals using very high‐resolution imagery. Marine Mammal Science.
Hope, A. P., Lopez-Coto, I., Hajny, K., Tomlin, J. M., Kaeser, R., Stirm, B., … & Shepson, P. B. (2023). Analyzing “grey zone” turbulent kinetic energy predictions in the boundary layer from three WRF PBL schemes over New York City and comparison to aircraft measurements. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.
Tomlin, J. M., Lopez-Coto, I., Hajny, K. D., Pitt, J. R., Kaeser, R., Stirm, B. H., … & Shepson, P. B. (2023). Spatial attribution of aircraft mass balance experiment CO2 estimations for policy-relevant boundaries: New York City. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 11(1).
Ding, L., Ding, C., Tao, J., Avigliano, E., Shipley, O. N., Tang, B., … & He, D. (2023). MFishBT: A global database of biogeochemical tags in migratory fish. Ecology, e4211.
Safina, C. (2023). Alfie & me: What owls know, what humans believe (First edition.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company
Chen, H., Zhang, H., Jang, S. G., Liu, X., Xing, L., Wu, Z., … & Chen, C. (2024). Road criticality assessment to improve commutes during floods. Journal of Environmental Management, 349, 119592.
Hsu, W. C., Kooperman, G. J., Hannah, W. M., Reed, K. A., Akinsanola, A. A., & Pendergrass, A. G. (2023). Evaluating mesoscale convective systems over the US in conventional and multiscale modeling framework configurations of E3SMv1. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 128(23), e2023JD038740.
Lee, C. S., Wang, M., Nanjappa, D., Lu, Y. T., Meliker, J., Clouston, S., … & Venkatesan, A. K. (2023). Monitoring of over-the-counter (OTC) and COVID-19 treatment drugs complement wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2. Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, 1-9.
Karion, A., Ghosh, S., Lopez-Coto, I., Mueller, K., Gourdji, S., Pitt, J., & Whetstone, J. (2023). Methane Emissions Show Recent Decline but Strong Seasonality in Two US Northeastern Cities. Environmental Science & Technology.
Huprikar, A., Stansfield, A., & Reed, K. (2023). A storyline analysis of Hurricane Irma’s precipitation under various levels of climate warming. Environmental Research Letters.
Lamer, K., Kollias, P., Luke, E. P., Treserras, B. P., Oue, M., & Dolan, B. (2023). Multisensor agile adaptive sampling (MAAS): A methodology to collect radar observations of convective cell life cycle. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 40(11), 1509-1522.
Wang, X., & Zhang, M. (2023). Convectively coupled Rossby–Gravity waves in a field campaign: How they are captured in reanalysis products. Atmospheric Science Letters, e1206.
Latest Press Headlines
Newsday: Building boom on LI campuses focusing on health care, STEM programs
- The building represents the latest in a string of multimillion dollar capital projects at Long Island’s universities and colleges, ranging from a more than $21 million facility at Suffolk County Community College with a focus on renewable energy to the $700 million Climate Exchange Center in New York City operated by Stony Brook University.
Innovate LI: No. 839: All bark and plenty of bite, with interscholastic PhDs, fake movies and real offshore-wind progress
- Baby, it’s hot outside: Don’t be fooled by this week’s frigid winter preview – the globe is warming, extreme heat events are increasing and Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences is on the case.
Treatment Plant Operator (TPO) Magazine: Research Shows Wastewater Testing Improves Predictions for COVID-19 Admissions
- Dustin Hill led a project that used wastewater surveillance data in predictive models to improve estimates for new COVID hospital admissions in New York state. The research team’s results were published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Infectious Disease Modeling and were gathered in collaboration with State University of New York at Albany, University at Buffalo, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Stony Brook University and the New York State Department of Health.
Newsweek: NASA Reveals Scale of Atmospheric River Causing Deadly Floods in Northwest
- “Scientists have shown that we can expect that storms are becoming more intense and wetter due to climate change,” Kevin A. Reed, an associate professor in Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, told Newsweek. “But the reality is that climate change is here and we are already noticing increases in rainfall extremes.” Also ran in Italy24.
Newswise: Stony Brook Climatologist, Professor Kevin Reed, Joins National Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (press release)
- Kevin Reed, Interim Director of Academic, Research and Commercialization Programs for The New York Climate Exchange led by Stony Brook University, has been appointed to the National Academies’ Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC).
Times Beacon Record: SBU team, led by Ping Liu, wins $500k NOAA grant to study heat waves
- Recently, a trio of scientists at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) received $500,000 from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to study heat events by using and analyzing NOAA’s Seamless System for Prediction and EArth System Research, or SPEAR, to understand heat waves and predict future such events.
KCRW-FM: Carl Safina on owls, philosophy, and our relationship to nature
- Carl Safina, ecologist and founding president of The Safina Center at Stony Brook University, has raised many different kinds of birds, including owls, and used to be a falconer. When a friend found a baby screech owl — no more than 10 days old — Safina planned to release her in their backyard. But, he says, “the plan had a flight delay because she didn’t really grow her wing feathers in properly, and I couldn’t turn her out because she couldn’t fly.”
Ivoox: Owls: What they know and what humans believe
- Carl Safina, ecologist and founding president of The Safina Center at Stony Brook University in New York, shares his experience raising a small owl. Safina recounts what he learned and why this period of his life was so joyful in his latest book Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe.
27east.com/Southampton Press: Having a Clear Impact: Chris Gobler Is The Southampton Press Western Edition Person of the Year
- Gobler is a professor within Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS). He received his Ph.D. from the university in the 1990s and then began his academic career at Long Island University in 1999. He came back to Stony Brook in 2005, where he took on the role of director of academic programs at SoMAS on both the Stony Brook and Southampton campuses.
Eletiofe/Wired: Yes, the Climate Crisis Is Now ‘Gobsmacking.’ But So Is Progress
- “At a certain point, even people who believe that climate change is happening—it’s human caused, it’s important—they simply can no longer engage with the topic, because they just feel so overwhelmed by the idea of it,” says Stony Brook University’s Christine Gilbert, who researches climate communication. “I am of the opinion that there is space for talking about the wins and the successes as a way to kind of continue to ground yourself.”
To Dive For Podcast: Episode 33 Exploring Long Island with Chris Paparo
- This week, hear from Chris Paparo, a Long Island native who has made it his mission to learn as much as he can about the local wildlife above and below the water’s surface.
Newsweek: Conservation Success Stories From 50 Years of the Endangered Species Act
- “They should have been really common in the region where I lived, but they were just about completely gone,” Carl Safina told Newsweek. Safina is an ecologist and prolific nature writer who teaches at Stony Brook University in New York.
Long Island Business News: 2023: How the Long Island region kept the momentum going/”Stony Brook University will anchor the New York Climate Exchange on Governors Island (overview including several Stony Brook stories
- Stony Brook University will anchor the New York Climate Exchange on Governor’s Island.
