April 8 from Chris Field: For rest of week I am at the IPCC Plenary in Budapest. This is a meeting to plot the future of the IPCC. It is mostly the national delegations and not the scientists.
Friday (4/11) I am flying back to LA to see Hal (Mooney) accept the Tyler Prize.
Next week, I will be reviewing the Harvard Center for the Environment on Monday (4/14), talking at a DOE conference on the future of climate change experiments on Tuesday, and working with the NRC Board on International Scientific Organizations on Wednesday and Thursday. A week from Friday (4/18), I will be back in the lab.
April 28: Chris met with a few of the FLAB group to discuss some of what he learned at recent meetings. He also continued the Tasting tradition by bringing five kinds of dried fruit from Whole Foods: peaches, apples, mangos, raspberries & pineapple (best).
April 18: Cristina Archer & Ken Caldeira have tracked changes in the average position and strength of jet streams using records compiled by various government agencies. The results published today in Geophysical Research Letters indicate that the jet streams in both hemispheres have risen in altitude, shifted toward the poles, and weakened in the northern hemisphere. These changes fit the predictions of global warming models and have implications for the frequency and intensity of future storms, including hurricanes.
April 5: Greg Asner has written a summarizing Chapter (12) titled Hyperspectral Remote Sensing of Canopy Chemistry, Physiology, and Biodiversity in Tropical Rainforests for a recent CRC Press Publication (Hyperspectral Remote Sensing of Tropical and Subtropical Forests). It's a compilation of past work of all kinds, with a few things that he never got around to publishing from LBA, etc.
This month Asner also reports that most of his team will be in Kruger National Park in South Africa. They'll be carrying out field studies and airborne mapping of key areas in the park. The focus of the study is on the effects of climate, soils, animals and fire on vegetation structure, composition and carbon dynamics.
April 9: The excitement is mounting as the group prepares to fly to South Africa where several have not been before. Some were scheduled to leave today, but bureaucracy intervened. Now they plan to leave on different flights this weekend (April 12-13).
April 11: Angelica Almeyda and Eben Broadbent led a lunchtime discussion on The political ecology of land conversion in the trinational border Peru-Brazil-Bolivia for the Brazilian Working Group in Bolivar House on Campus.
April 23: Chris Field spoke in the Los Altos Library on the science of global warming at an event serving to kick off the Cool Los Altos' Low Carbon Challenge. Chris lives in Los Altos where the Group sponsoring this event aims to sign up 500 households to participate in the Challenge.
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