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AOS in the News

Lunjin Chen selected as recipiant of 2012 AGU Fred Scraf Award

The F. L. Scarf Award was established in 1989 by the AGU’s Space Physics and Aeronomy Section to recognize an outstanding dissertation that contributes directly to solar-planetary science. This is a great honor and reflects on the highly innovative and original research that Lunjin conducted as an AOS graduate student.

AOS Professor Liou wins major international award


AOS Professor Liou is the recipient of the 2012 Quadrennial Gold Medal Award given by the International Radiation Commission (IRC). Read More...

AOS Professors Curtis Deutsch and Holger Brix with Hartmut Frenzel (and others) publish a paper in Science magazine detailing Climate-Forced Variabilty of Ocean Hypoxia.


Oxygen (O2) is a critical constraint on marine ecosystems. As oceanic O2 falls to hypoxic concentrations, habitability for aerobic organisms decreases rapidly. We show that the spatial extent of hypoxia is highly sensitive to small changes in the ocean’s O2 content, with maximum responses at suboxic concentrations where anaerobic metabolisms predominate. In model-based reconstructions of historical oxygen changes, the world’s largest suboxic zone, in the Pacific Ocean, varies in size by a factor of 2. This is attributable to climate-driven changes in the depth of the tropical and subtropical thermocline that have multiplicative effects on respiration rates in low-O2 water. The same mechanism yields even larger fluctuations in the rate of nitrogen removal by denitrification, creating a link between decadal climate oscillations and the nutrient limitation of marine photosynthesis.
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UCLA joins Southern California Marine Institute to revitalize marine research in Los Angeles


AOS' own professors Jim McWilliams and Burkard Baschek lead the effort to partner. "UCLA has entered into a collaboration with the Southern California Marine Institute (SCMI) that will streamline marine research operations and expand research opportunities for UCLA students and faculty, Joseph Rudnick, dean of the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences, has announced.
UCLA joins the SCMI at the onset of a bold initiative to build a new research and clean-technology facility at the Port of Los Angeles that may become the largest marine research institute in an urban setting in the world, Rudnick said.
Through the new partnership, UCLA will share resources with 10 local universities to operate a facility at the port that provides waterfront access for oceanographic and marine biology studies, maintenance for scientific vessels, and a formal channel for cooperation among researchers in the Los Angeles area." Read the Complete Article

Members of the Space Physics group (including Toshi Nishimura, Jacob Bortnik, Wen Li, Larry Lyons, Richard Thorne, and a few others) have discovered the origin of the "pulsating aurora", whose origin has remained a mystery since the 1960's. The article was published in the journal Science on October 1, 2010.

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Scattering by chorus waves as the dominant cause of diffuse auroral precipitation

UCLA researchers & Richard M. Thorne, Binbin Ni, Xin Tao, Richard B. Horne & Nigel P. Meredith were published in the Journal Nature on October 20, 2010.

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Members of the Space Physics group (including Toshi Nishimura, Jacob Bortnik, Wen Li, Larry Lyons, Richard Thorne, and a few others) have discovered the origin of the "pulsating aurora", whose origin has remained a mystery since the 1960's. The article was published in the journal Science on October 1, 2010.

Read the Complete article