RUCOOL Updates: December 2021 – January 2022

Hello 2022! Yes, many of us started the first 30 days of the year remotely, but we are now back in the office and in person for classes. It’s been a busy 9 weeks of proposal writing in addition to all the goings on listed below. RUCOOL will likely be adding to our team in the coming months as our offshore operations expand.

State 

• Congratulations to Dr. Emily Slesinger (Grace Saba advisor) who successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Black sea bass physiology and life history in the context of seasonal and long-term climate change.” Emily is now working as a NRC fellow at a NOAA NMFS lab in Newport, Oregon. 
• Congratulations to Dr. Schuyler Nardelli (Oscar Schofield advisor) on defending her PhD thesis entitled “Seasonal dynamics of plankton ecology in coastal Antarctica.” Schuyler is now a Knauss Marine Policy Fellow in Washington D.C. working with NOAA IOOS. 
• Congratulations to Dr. Liza Wright-Fairbanks (Grace Saba Advisor) for successfully defending her dissertation, “Observing seasonal cycles, drivers, and potential biological impacts of ocean acidification in the Mid-Atlantic Bight.” Dr. Wright-Fairbanks is now a  Knauss Marine Policy Fellow working with the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program. 
• Alex Lopez joined RUCOOL and began his work in heading up teaching/training for our 3rd cohort of Masters of Operational Oceanography students. The students have chosen their areas of theses research that will culminate in summer graduation. 
• Chancellor-Provost of Rutgers Francine Conway, Vice Chancellor Alex Perex, and SEBS Dean Laura Lawson, visited the COOLroom in December. It was great to see everyone in person, and we are looking forward to more visits this spring.
• December and January are typically quiet times for our glider team, but this year we had four deployments off the NJ coast focused on right whale detection (Orsted), ocean acidification research (NOAA), and water quality measurements (NJDEP). 

National

• NOAA Science Advisory Board (SAB) Priorities for Weather Research (PWR) co-leads Scott Glenn (Rutgers oceanographer) and Brad Colman (Climate Corporation meteorologist) have entered the communication phase of the PWR Report.  So far in 2022, they hosted a community Town Hall (165+ attendees) at the American Meteorology Society (AMS) meeting and have presented to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
• Hugh Roarty gave a webinar on “Multi-Mission Radar for the US Coast Guard” for 80 homeland security stakeholders.  The webinar series is sponsored by the Maritime Security Center, A Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence
• The RUCOOL Education team has been working on the 4-H STEM Challenge for fall 2022, highlighting climate change research and gliders in three activities:
  • Ocean Robot Lab: In this activity, youth will test an ocean robot to understand how they work. They will look through data collected by ocean robots and scenarios where ocean robots are pivotal to study. Youth may take the glider apart and reverse engineer it to further explore how it works.
  • Ocean Expedition: In this activity, youth will compete in a board game to navigate their ocean robot around the world while learning key ocean concepts. Topics include aquaculture, climate change, innovation, human impacts, and the marine ecosystem. 
  • Ocean Communicator:  In this activity, youth will investigate four ocean challenges that ocean scientists, engineers, and technologists are currently exploring. Each challenge requires collective innovations, technical solutions, and strives to inspire public action.  

International

• Grace Saba was invited to participate in the Environmental Defense Fund-Bezos Earth Fund Open Ocean Blue Carbon Workshops focused on natural climate solutions in the open ocean: readiness of four proposed pathways to serve as a source of high-quality carbon credits. These workshops spanned three sessions from December 2021-January 2022.
• Rutgers has been participating in the NSF’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project at Palmer Station Antarctica for over 30 years. Graduate students Quintin Diou-Cass and Joe Gradone returned from a successful research season aboard the R/V Nathaniel Palmer which was offshore of the West Antarctic Peninsula. Now it’s time to get to work analyzing the data!
• The RUCOOL team released the new Palmer LTER website. This website not only serves as the information portal for possible researchers, but also as a data archive for data acquired at Palmer LTER, since 1991.
• Oscar Schofield coordinated the formation of a technology task team for the Southern Ocean Observing System.
• Oscar Schofield joins the Resource Strategy Group for the international G7 Future of the Seas and Ocean Initiative, coordinating the development and deployment of the global Bio-Argo array. 
• The Palmer LTER conducted its research expedition in December, that included a major 31 day cruise as well as deployment and recovery of gliders in Antarctica

Newly Funded Research 

• NJ Department of Environmental Protection, “Calibration Experiments for a Novel Clam Survey Dredge and Monitoring Carbonate Chemistry of Surfclam Habitat,” Daphne Munroe PI, Grace Saba co-PI ( $865,440, 1 year).
• National Science Foundation, “OCB Fish, Fisheries and Carbon Workshop: An emerging research direction in the ocean biological carbon sink,” Grace Saba ($30,000, 1 year).
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Integrated Ocean Observing System (through University of Delaware MARACOOS), “MARACOOS Data to Model Comparisons,” Travis Miles ($143,000, 1 year). 
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Integrated Ocean Observing System (through University of Delaware MARACOOS), “IOOS Glider DAC,” Michael Crowley ($135,500, 1 year). 
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Integrated Ocean Observing System (through University of Delaware MARACOOS), “MARACOOS (Mid-Atlantic IOOS): Powering Understanding and Prediction of the Mid-Atlantic Ocean, Coast and Estuaries,”  Oscar Schofield ($1,108,577, 1 year). 
• University of Puerto Rico, “Caribbean Coastal Ocean Observation System – CARICOOS,” Hugh Roarty ($51,000, 1 year).
• NASA Rapid Response Program. 2022-2023. “Improving our understanding in situ carbon dynamics to ocean color in the Southern Ocean by adding bio-optical instrumentation to the SOCCOM Float-based Observing System” Oscar Schofield ($271,000, 1 year).
• CODAR Ocean Sensors, “Wind Turbine Interference Mitigation,” Hugh Roarty ($25,000, 1 year).

Papers Published: (**Current or Former Graduate Student or Postdoctoral Researchers)

• Sipps, K., Arbuckle-Keil, G., Fahrenfeld, N., Walsh, K., Garzio, L., Chant, R., Saba, G. 2022. Pervasive occurrence of microplastics in Hudson-Raritan estuary zooplankton. Science of the Total Environment 817: 152812, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.152812.
• Miles, T.N., D. Zhang, G.R. Foltz, J. Zhang, C. Meinig, F. Bringas, J. Triñanes, M. Le Hénaff, M.F. Aristizabal Vargas, S. Coakley, C.R. Edwards, D. Gong, R.E. Todd, M.J. Oliver, W.D. Wilson, K. Whilden, B. Kirkpatrick, P. Chardon-Maldonado, J.M. Morell, D. Hernandez, G. Kuska, C.D. Stienbarger, K. Bailey, C. Zhang, S.M. Glenn, and G.J. Goni. 2021. Uncrewed ocean gliders and saildrones support hurricane forecasting and research. Pp. 78–81 in Frontiers in Ocean Observing: Documenting Ecosystems, Understanding Environmental Changes, Forecasting Hazards. E.S. Kappel, S.K. Juniper, S. Seeyave, E. Smith, and M. Visbeck, eds, A Supplement to Oceanography 34(4), DOI: 10.5670/oceanog.2021.supplement.02-28
• Russell, J. L., Long, D. G,  Chang, P., Cowell, M., Curchister, E., Dinniman, M. S., Fellows, C., Goodman, P. J., Hofmann, E. E., Jelenak, Z., Klinck, J., Lovenduski, N., Lofverstrom, M., Mazloff, M., Petroy, S., Polit, A., Rodriguez, E., Schofield, O., Stouffer, R. J., Wanninkhof, R., Weimerr, C., Zeng, X. 2021. Measuring Winds from Space to Reduce the Uncertainty in the Southern Ocean Carbon Budget: An Observing System Design Experiment and Proposed Mission. Geophysical Research Letters doi: DOI: 10.1002/essoar.10506276.1
• Bascur M, Morley SA, Meredith MP, Muñoz-Ramírez CP, Barnes DKA, Schloss IR, Sands CJ, Schofield O, Román-Gonzaléz A, Cárdenas L, Venables H, Brante A, Urzúa Á. 2021. Interpopulational differences in the nutritional condition of Aequiyoldia eightsii (Protobranchia: Nuculanidae) from the Western Antarctic Peninsula during austral summer. PeerJ 9:e12679 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.12679
• Kim, H., Bowman, J. S., Luo, Y., Ducklow, H. W., Schofield, O. M., Steinberg, D. K., Doney, S. C. 2022. Modeling polar marine ecosystem functions guided by bacterial physiological and taxonomic traits. Biogeosciences. DOI: 10.5194/bg-19-117-2022
• Friedland, K. D., Miles, T., Goode, A.G., Powell, E. N., & Brady, D. C. (2022). The Middle Atlantic Bight Cold Pool is warming and shrinking: Indices from in situ autumn seafloor temperatures.Fisheries Oceanography,31(2),217–223. DOI: 10.1111/fog.12573
• Wang, J., Fu, L., Haines, B., Lankhorst, M., Archers, M., Aragon, D., Bigorre, S., Chao, Y., Farrar, T., Kerfoot, J., Lucas, A., Meinig, C., Ray, R., Sandwell, D., Send, U., Sevadijan, J., Schofield, O., Stalin, S. 2022. On the development of SWOT in situ Calibration/Validation of the short-wavelength ocean topography. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic technology. DOI: 10.1175/JTECH-D-21-0039.1

RUCOOL Meetings & Conferences 

RUCOOL continues to lead/attend numerous virtual meetings. Here are some meetings which our team attended and/or presented: Hurricane Glider Hotwash (NOAA IOOS), Raritan River Consortium Meeting, US Navy Glider Hotwash (NOAA IOOS), Underwater Glider Usergroup Planning Meetings, Environmental Defense Fund-Bezos Earth Fund Open Ocean Blue Carbon Workshop, ​​Global OceanGliders Steering Committee Meeting, National Academies of Sciences U.S. Committee for the U.N. Ocean Decade meetings, NOAA Science Advisory Board Environmental Information Services Working Group meetings.