Soil moisture is known to be an essential factor in controlling the partitioning of rainfall into surface runoff and infiltration and solar energy into latent and sensible heat fluxes. Remote sensing has long proven its capability to obtain soil moisture in near real-time. However, at the present time we have the Advanced Scanning Microwave Radiometer (AMSR-E) on board NASA’s AQUA platform is the only satellite sensor that supplies a soil moisture product. AMSR-E coarse spatial resolution (~ 50 km at 6.9 GHz) strongly limits its applicability for small scale studies.

Recent research results have suggested that the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) may alter the intensity of Atlantic Tropical Cyclone (TC) activity.

Evidence is presented to show there are two distinct types of tropical Pacific warming: an eastern Pacific (EP) type that grows out of South American coast and has most of its sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the eastern Pacific, and a central-Pacific (CP) type that has most of its SST anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific and extended into the northeastern subtropical Pacific. The EP type is the conventional El Niño and is associated with a basin-wide change in the Walker circulation, i.e. Southern Oscillation.

In marine sediments, the rates of biologically mediated reductive-oxidative reactions such as denitrification are generally assumed to be limited by diffusion. In this talk, I will show that in the anoxic sediments of two California Borderland basins, ~ 30 % or more of nitrate converted to N₂ is supplied into the sediments via non-local transport from the overlying water by motile organisms.

I will present a suite of observations upon which this conclusion is based:

Dramatic global increases in anthropogenic nutrient production on land and negative impacts on coastal systems due to export from rivers are extensively documented, and represent a major driver of global ecosystem change. Increased nutrient mobilization is expected to continue for decades in response to economic and population growth.

Many features of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation(ENSO) display significant interdecadal changes such as amplitude, period, and developing features, and also nonlinearities, especially the El Niño-La Niña asymmetry. In particular, positive skewness (a strong El Niño vs. a weak La Niña) of the tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies is dominant over the eastern tropical Pacific, with an increase seen during recent decades (e.g., 1980–2000).

Designing effective climate change mitigation and adaptation measures requires rigorous, comprehensive, detailed analyses of the response of climate dynamics to elevated greenhouse gas concentrations, and of the potential impacts of those climate changes on natural and human systems. Do date, most of the emphasis has been placed on the large-scale climate response through the use of relatively low-resolution global climate models, while far less attention has been given to the role of fine-scale climate processes through the use of high-resolution climate models.

Soil organic matter (SOM) stores more organic carbon than is present in living biomass and as atmospheric CO₂ combined. Understanding biogeochemical factors driving SOM dynamics is key to manage agricultural and forestry systems for productivity, sustainability, and their potential to store atmospheric CO₂. Models describing SOM budgets assume different rates of SOM turnover based on conceptual pools treating SOM as a 'black box’.