Michigan Engineering Alumni Weekend

October 2, 2008 - 7:00 pm

Michigan Engineering Alumni Society Awards Reception and Dinner

October 3, 2008 - 6:30 pm

Time TBD

2008 Alumni of the Year Lecture

October 3, 2008 - 12:30 pm

Prof. Brian G. Heikes, Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, "Microphysics 2 chemistry 2 biogeochemistry 2 microphysics" The trajectory of an AOS(S) graduate is followed from Ann Arbor to points around the world in pursuit of the linkages of meteorology, chemistry and climate. Two themes will be pursued - sulfur gas chemistry and formaldehyde with a smattering of hydrogen peroxide, methylhydroperoxide and ozone.

2008 Dean's Seminar Series

October 6, 2008 - 12:30 pm

Creating and Implementing Breakthrough Medical Technology. The speaker will be Dr. Robert Langer, Institute Professor at MIT. The seminar is intended to be accessible to our entire community, from first year students through graduate students and faculty and staff. After the seminar students working on creating medical products will be available in the lobby of Chrysler to talk about their work.

17th Annual US/Canada Great Lakes Operational Meteorology Workshop

October 8, 2008 - 7:00 am

The 17th Annual U.S./Canada Great Lakes Operational Meteorology Workshop offers an excellent opportunity for participants to exchange ideas and research findings related to all aspects of Great Lakes meteorology. Specifics regarding the workshop location, hotel accommodations, abstract submission, agenda and registration information will be made available at: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dtx/?n=glom. Abstracts will be accepted through September 1, 2008. Please submit in MS Word format via email to: Greg.Mann@noaa.gov. The workshop is co-sponsored by NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) and the Meteorological Service of Canada. This year's workshop is co-hosted by NWS Detroit-Pontiac and the University of Michigan - Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences.

AOSS 749 2008 Fall Seminar Series

October 9, 2008 - 3:30 pm

Neil Donahue, Associate Professor, Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University. "Organic Aerosol Chemistry: What Are We Missing?" Recent developments in field measurements of organic aerosol give us a clear picture of key attributes of bulk organic aerosol. Traditional representations of organic aerosol miss the mark by a wide margin. Primary organic aerosol are traditionally represented as non-volatile tarballs, whereas POA turns out to be relatively volatile. Secondary organic aerosol are traditionally represented as a semi-volatile veneer mixed with the primary aerosol in modest amounts, whereas SOA turns out to be highly oxidized, much less volatile, and dominant. We are developing a framework to represent the coupling of volatility and oxidation for this complex system. Our challenge is to represent organic oxidation chemistry in a way that respects what we do know about organic oxidation mechanisms but that can cover tens of thousands of compounds, many of them never observed or studied. We do this with a combination of laboratory experiments and theory, grouping compounds by volatility and oxidation state and constraining kinetics and mechanisms in this two-dimensional space. Using this framework, we can indeed recover the basic features of ambient observations with a computationally efficient scheme.

SPRL at 60: Universities and Space Exploration

October 16, 2008 - 7:00 pm

An open discussion on the role of universities in space exploration and engineering. As interests, funding and project structures change, how should institutions of higher education that are based in hard science research react; how do these changes affect the education of future scientists and engineers — what does the future hold? More Information

To view the talks and discussions, visit the Recording Archive at the CoE Instructional Technology's website.

Visit the photo gallery to view photos from the symposium.

SPRL at 60: Universities and Space Exploration

October 17, 2008 - 7:00 pm

An open discussion on the role of universities in space exploration and engineering. As interests, funding and project structures change, how should institutions of higher education that are based in hard science research react; how do these changes affect the education of future scientists and engineers — what does the future hold?

AOSS 749 2008 Fall Seminar Series

October 23, 2008 - 3:30 pm

Nilton Renno, Associate Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Michigan. "Evidence for Liquid Water on Mars" The objective of the Phoenix Mars mission is to determine if Mars’ polar region can support life. Since liquid water is a basic ingredient for life, as we know, an important goal of the mission is to determine if liquid water exists at the landing site. It is believed that a layer of martian soil preserves ice by forming a barrier against high temperatures and sublimation, but that exposed ice sublimates without the formation of the liquid phase. We show independent physical and thermodynamical evidence that besides ice, liquid saline-water exists in areas disturbed by the Phoenix lander. Moreover, we show that the thermodynamics of freeze-thaw cycles ranging from diurnal to climatic time-scales leads to the formation of saline solutions with freezing temperatures much higher than current summer ground temperatures where surface ice exists near the surface. Thus, we hypothesize that liquid saline-water is common on Mars. This discovery has important implications for the stability of water, weathering, glaciology, mineralogy, geochemistry and the habitability of Mars.

AOSS 749 2008 Fall Seminar Series

October 30, 2008 - 3:30 pm

Prof. K. N. Liou, Professor, Dept. of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California at Los Angeles.

Title: Mountain Snow and Regional Climate Change: Aerosol Absorption and 3D Radiative Transfer.

Abstract The increasing presence of light-absorbing black carbon (BC) and dust in California and the western US as a result of East Asian trans-Pacific transport appears to increase the ripening and melting rate of the Sierra Nevada’s snowpack, augmenting basin peak runoff in the winter season and reducing water flows in the summer season.

We use a regional climate model under development at the UCLA Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering to understand these physical processes, as well as their impact on surface temperature increase and water resources management in southern California within the context of global warming. MODIS albedo and snow cover datasets were utilized to investigate the Sierra Mountains’ snowmelt during March and April for a 7-year period, followed by a study of snow-aerosol physics over 3D and inhomogeneous mountains.

We discuss the importance of absorption of snow grains contaminated by BC/dust with reference to internal and external mixing and the consequence of snow albedo evaluation. Subsequently, we present the effect of mountains on surface radiation balance. On the basis of a 3D Monte Carlo photon tracing program, we demonstrate the significance of small scale variability of solar and thermal IR surface radiative flux distributions within a GCM and a regional scale. We point out that if realistic mountain features were not accounted for in surface energy balance modeling, a substantial domain-average solar flux deviation of about 10-50 W/m2 from the smoothed topography of conventional climate models would occur. Finally, we discuss the issues of developing physically-based and accurate parameterizations of the effects of BC/Dust contamination and 3D inhomogeneous features on interactive solar albedo and radiative flux calculations over mountain snow surfaces.

These problems are intricate and challenging research tasks. However, they must be accomplished if we wish to build a surface energy balance model based on the first principle for climate simulation in areas of intense topography comprising snow.