Director's Statement

In the report "Confronting Climate Change in California," the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ecological Society of America note that the "past century has seen an apparent four-fold increase in the rate at which the earth is warming."  With the dramatic effects of climate events such as El Niño and current trends in global greenhouse-gas and aerosol emissions, the considerable impact on our environment and economy is increasingly in the spotlight. State and federal policy makers are looking to the scientific community to provide the data necessary to help them in making policy decisions relating to the environment.  ICESS, with an infrastructure that promotes long-term multi-process environmental research that addresses the ways the physical, chemical, and biogeochemical systems function, is uniquely positioned to provide this input.

 

While virtually all ICESS principal investigators are involved in one or more long-term research projects, some of our newer researchers have brought to ICESS exciting projects ranging from transformations of pollutants to climate modeling. Dr. Charles Jones, for instance, is studying the dynamics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, an oscillation of the atmosphere-ocean system in the tropical regions that seems to be linked to many short-term climate changes. His studies show that the frequency of extreme events is higher when tropical activity associated with the MJO is high, as opposed to periods of quiescent phases of the oscillation. Additionally, a slight preference for a higher number of events is observed when convective anomalies are located in the Indian Ocean.  Dr. Natalie Mahowald, along with several other ICESS investigators, has begun a project involving the numerical modeling of dust transport in the Africa and Atlantic regions and their impact on climate variability.  While these two projects focus strongly on computing and climate modeling, Dr. Patricia Holden's research efforts have been focusing on the seasonal effects on soil bacterial processing and the presence and origins of pathogenic microbes in coastal waters.  Thus far, her group has generated two organisms that fluoresce when they produce pollutant-solubilizing compounds.  They envision using these organisms for improving the basic understanding of soil microbial function and, perhaps, as real-time bio-sensors for pollutants.

 

Within ICESS, interdisciplinary scientific research is actively promoted through shared resources, scientific collaboration, and graduate student education. Faculty, researchers, and students from a variety of disciplines address environmental issues, studying the Earth as a complex system. For instance, we recently completed significant upgrades to the computing infrastructure including a file management system scaleable to 6.7TB, a tape library/back-up system, network switches capable of 100Mbps, a computational task scheduler, two Compaq/Digital Alpha XP1000 compute servers (each with 1.5GB of RAM). An SGI Origin 2000 was acquired to allow large computations as required for simulation of regional and climate modeling. These upgrades assist ICESS in furthering collaborative research within the unit.

 

As an Organized Research Unit, our mission continues to be "to provide a distributed, interdisciplinary computer environment for the promotion and support of research and research education in Earth system science, an interdisciplinary environment and computer-related service that enhances the excellence and competitive advantage of UCSB global change research, a center of excellence to provide visibility and aid in the attraction of top faculty and students to UCSB, and an efficiently-run business operations and administration that supports research".

 

In conclusion, the past year has brought some interesting changes to the research groups within ICESS.  Through mentoring by established faculty and researchers, the research programs of younger faculty and researchers have begun to flourish.  Fostering the development of these ten young research groups has proven very exciting.  We have high hopes for each of these newer teams and look forward to their continuing contributions to the interdisciplinary research that takes place within ICESS.

 

Catherine Gautier, Director