By Zachary K. Erickson, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / GREENBELT, MARYLAND / The ocean is full of eddies – swirling water masses that are the ocean equivalent of hurricanes. In comparison with their atmospheric counterparts, eddies are smaller, longer-lived, and far more numerous: at any given moment, well over 1,000 eddies exist throughout the …
By Sara Blumberg, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Inia Soto Ramos, Universities Space Research Association / GREENBELT, MARYLAND / Pandemics can change the plans of nearly everything, including ocean research. That's exactly what happened with EXPORTS. In 2019, the original North Atlantic Expedition along with its active research projects were cancelled. Despite the setback, …
By Sara Blumberg, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Inia Soto Ramos, Universities Space Research Association / GREENBELT, MARYLAND / When we talk about climate change, we tend to think of lush forests with giant trees that passively trap carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use them for food in a process called photosynthesis. The …
Madeline Beck, Undergraduate Student in Environmental Science, Montana State University Being part of a NASA research team is an exciting experience! Knowing our work will correspond with further research endeavors and help validate remotely sensed measurements makes us feel like part of a greater effort and team. The research site is in a beautiful part …
Like so many other things, NASA's SnowEx 2021 looks a little different than usual this year. But one thing is business as usual, and that's the participation of undergraduate and graduate students. Students play a pivotal role in SnowEx, from suiting up for data collection to crunching the numbers afterward. The field sites become a …
By Elena Solohin, Florida International University /NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA/ My colleague, Emily, and I, with Florida International University's Wetland Ecosystems Research Lab, kicked off our 2021 field season with a trip to the Mississippi River Delta to conduct research for NASA's Delta-X project. We met up with a team of scientists from Louisiana State University …
By John Mallard and Tamlin Pavelsky, University of North Carolina /NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA/ Cruising through a bayou during recent fieldwork in the Mississippi River Delta, our boat driver casually pointed out an alligator and zoomed on by without slowing. After seeing us scramble to get out our phones to take a picture, though, he realized …
By Amanda Fontenot, Louisiana State University /NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA/ Although most of my work happens in the lab, office, or home, field days are some of the most important days of the year for my research. "Going to the field" is when we get to physically visit the wetlands that we spend so much …
