Alumni

Dear Alumni and Friends,

I am pleased to send you the second annual edition of the UCLA
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) newsletter.
There are many exciting things happening in AOS, and this is a
way to share some of our news with you. Several of you sent us
messages after last year's letter, and we encourage even more
communication in the future.

AOS is a national leader in understanding the physical and
chemical processes involved in Earth's atmosphere, ocean and
near-Earth space plasmas. We increasingly believe it is important
for us to encompass marine and terrestrial biospheric processes
related to climate. These topics are more and more relevant as
human activities change our global environment, and mitigation
and adaptation measures are crucially necessary. We also are
expanding our scope in space sciences cooperatively with other
units at UCLA, both for the valuable comparative phenomena with
Earth and for the exciting new observational discoveries about
the sun and planets within the solar system and beyond.

AOS has among the highest ratios of faculty research funds per
capita in the College Division of Physical Sciences. Each faculty
member raises an average of $400,000 to $500,000 in grants each
year. These grants help us recruit and retain excellent graduate
students, and offer us the ability to provide them with research
opportunities early in their careers. The cost of graduate
student support is high (about $40,000 per year for domestic
students and $50,000 per year for international students), and it
is a constant scramble by the faculty to maintain the program. To
a lesser extent we also offer research opportunities to our
undergraduate students, and we hope to expand them in the
future.

UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM

The undergraduate program is healthy and continues to grow, with
a larger number of courses offered to meet the demand. For
example, our upper division course in air and water pollution
(AOS 104) has become so popular it is now offered twice a year
and still fills to capacity almost instantly. Increased demand
has allowed us to retool some courses that were once shared with
the graduate curriculum. Our atmospheric physics course (AOS
145), for example, is now targeted exclusively to undergraduates.
A new course in experimental meteorology and oceanography is in
development, thanks to Professors Jochen Stutz and Burkard
Baschek. Each year a number of our students do internships at the
National Weather Service offices in California, including those
at Oxnard, San Diego, Sacramento and Monterey. Some internships
are paid and lead directly to permanent employment with the
Weather Service. AOS is very proud that five of our students were
awarded this special internship during the last two years, a new
record for our program. Graduates of our program currently serve
in the Weather Service and other NOAA offices across the United
States.

GRADUATE PROGRAM

In the past two years AOS has had 15 M.S. students graduate
(eight of whom continued toward a Ph.D. degree), and 15 Ph.D.
students graduated. A list of the latter with their adviser and
current postgraduate employer is the following:

Simona Bordoni M.S. '03, Ph.D '07 (Stevens, Caltech);
Richard Hansell M.S. '04, Ph.D '08 (Liou, NASA Goddard Space
Flight Center);
Christopher Holloway M.S. '04, Ph.D '08 (Neelin, University of
Reading);
Mimi Hughes M.S. '04, Ph.D '08 (Hall, NOAA Earth System Research
Laboratory);
Wei-Liang Lee M.S. '03, Ph.D '08 (Liou, Academica Sinica);
Nicole Lovenduski M.S. '03, Ph.D '07 (Gruber and McWilliams,
Colorado State University);
Brian Medeiros M.S. '03, Ph.D '07 (Hall and Stevens, Colorado
State University);
Xin Qu M.S. '03, Ph.D '07 (Hall, UCLA);
Olga Pikelnaya '00, M.S. '05, Ph.D '08 (Stutz, UCLA);
Verica Savic-Jovcic M.S. '03, Ph.D '08 (Stevens, University of
Maryland);
Yong Shi M.S. '04, Ph.D '08 (Lyons, UCLA);
Kirill Strounine M.S. '04, Ph.D '07 (Ghil, Terra Technology);
Xingjuan Wang M.S. '03, Ph.D '08 (Liou, German Aerospace Center
[DLR]);
Chien-Ming Wu M.S. '04, Ph.D '08 (Mechoso, UCLA);
Heng Xiao M.S. '03, Ph.D '08 (Mechoso, UCLA).

GRADUATE STUDENT AWARDS AND ANNUAL BANQUET

AOS has an annual Awards Banquet to honor graduate student
achievements in three areas:

Jacob Bjerknes Award for academic excellence and research

Morris Neiburger Award for outstanding teaching

Brian Bosart Award for positive contributions to department life

The award winners last year were Christopher Holloway and Mimi
Hughes [Bjerknes], Kam Weng (Clare) Wong '04, M.S. '07
(Neiburger), and Sergio Abarca Fuente M.S. '07 and Christopher
Holloway (Bosart). This year the dinner will be on Friday, Nov.
14, 6-8:30 p.m. in the Grand Horizon Room at Covel Commons,
UCLA. Our guest speaker for the evening will be Wolfgang Buermann
on the subject of recent history and prospects for global
biodiversity. We hope you received your invitation to this event
and will be able to join us.

FACULTY TRANSITIONS

We are pleased to welcome Qinbin Li as a new assistant professor
in AOS. His expertise is atmospheric chemical modeling, and he
previously worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Duane Waliser was appointed as an adjunct professor. His
expertise is climate variability, and his primary appointment is
at JPL.

Wolfgang Buermann is a new adjunct assistant professor, jointly
between AOS and the Institute of the Environment. His expertise
is terrestrial ecosystems.

Randall Friedl '78 is a new adjunct professor, currently on leave
with NASA Headquarters. He works in atmospheric chemistry.

Finally, Professor Bjorn Stevens is on leave pro tem as Director
of the Atmosphere in the Earth System group in the Max Plank
Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

GEOSCIENCES INITIATIVE

The Geosciences Initiative is a strategic hiring plan sponsored
by the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences to foster
interdisciplinary research between AOS, the Earth and Space
Sciences Department (ESS), the Institute of Geophysics and
Planetary Physics (IGPP) and other geoscience and astrophysical
units at UCLA. Based on a plan devised in spring 2007, we
conducted eight faculty searches this past year in the areas of
atmospheric chemistry and aerosols; planetary science;
biogeoscience; land-surface processes; planetary atmospheres;
environment, energy and society; surface processes and climate;
and solar variability. The searches were an enormous undertaking
by our faculties. At present we have made four appointment offers
and had four acceptances. They are Qinbin Li (atmospheric
chemistry, in AOS and already here); Jonathan Mitchell (planetary
atmospheres, half-time in each of AOS and ESS and due here next
year); and Jean-Luc Margot and David Jewitt (planetary science,
in ESS next year). We anticipate that several more appointment
offers will be made in the next few months.

FACILITIES UPGRADES

We were fortunate this year to have matching funding from the
dean's office to expand AOS's computer server rooms and to
upgrade our graduate student offices. For the computers we added
air conditioning, dedicated electrical outlets and additional
data ports to our server rooms, enabling us to house many more
computer servers and clusters used by faculty and their research
groups. We also bought 20 new computers for our Synoptic
Meteorology Laboratory. Our arrangement of the lab allows
research groups to use the computers in a cluster configuration
overnight, while the lab is not being used for instruction. In
addition, we gave our graduate student offices a thorough
make-over. We discarded the very old and mismatched furniture and
started fresh. The ceilings were replaced, floors were waxed,
windows were cleaned and walls were painted. We then installed
blinds, and bought new workstations and chairs for the students.
Most offices have a central group of tables and a whiteboard to
facilitate work on collaborative projects. The graduate student
offices have never looked better, and we can now offer our
students an environment more conducive to concentrated study and
research. Future projects include a refurbishment of the Brian
Bosart Memorial Lounge; a complete renovation of our 7th floor
display cases that will include the installation of monitors
exhibiting research projects, meteorological data, and department
information; and a reconfiguration of work space to consolidate
our computer support staff in one office. Planning has begun for
all three projects, though completion will depend on funding
availability.

NEW AOS WEB SITE

We're very excited to announce the launch of our new Web site:
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu. The Web site was created by Use All
Five (a web design company comprised of former UCLA students)
with input from AOS faculty, researchers, students and staff.
The homepage features our new AOS logo in the upper right corner.
The new logo, created by three former AOS students -- Chris
Holloway, Brian Medeiros and Verica Savic-Jovcic -- was the
winning entry in our spring departmental logo contest. On our
Web site, you'll find a full listing of AOS personnel, links to
various areas of research and individual web pages, information
on our undergraduate and graduate student programs and daily
weather data. We aimed to create a Web site that is attractive,
informative, easy to use and useful to those both within and
outside AOS. We hope you'll visit our Web site and let us know
what you think.

ALUMNI INFORMATION

As part of the new Web site, we have started an alumni page
http://www.UCLAlumni.net/AOSNov01?email=IBTN.
It includes the current and previous newsletter, the Awards
Banquet invitation; AOS seminars; donation information; and a
personal update form that you are encouraged to fill out:
http://www.UCLAlumni.net/AOSNov02?email=IBTN.
Completing this form posts your information for others to read.
Other types of information could be added if you make suggestions
for what would be of interest. Send by e-mail to
mailto:

FACULTY RESEARCH

I encourage you to explore our Web site and discover the broad
range of research interests we have. To find out more, click on
Research at http://www.UCLAlumni.net/AOSNov03?email=IBTN.

DEPARTMENTAL EVENTS

The department holds a weekly seminar on Wednesday afternoons at
4 p.m., plus several more specialized seminars. We encourage you
to attend those of interest to you. The topics and schedule may
be found at http://www.UCLAlumni.net/AOSNov04?email=IBTN.
In particular, you are invited to attend the annual student
Awards Banquet on Nov. 14 described above.

*****

Our department, though small, has a long history of excellence
and collegiality, and we hope to create stronger ties among our
alumni, faculty and students. Please share this newsletter with
your fellow alumni and colleagues. We would like to hear from you
as well. Please e-mail questions, comments or updates on your
activities that you would like to share to
mailto:

James McWilliams
Chair and Professor
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences