RUCOOL Updates: July-September 2022

2022 has passed by at lightning speed as we enter the final quarter of the year. It was a busy summer of field work followed by the start of another school year. Things have returned a bit back to normal as travel and meetings are once again underway both nationally and internationally. 

State 

• Our new cohort of six Masters of Operational Oceanography students started in early August and they hit the ground running with Glider School, HF-Radar School, and Software Bootcamp. They have already performed field work with HF-Radar maintenance and Glider deployments. 
• Grace Saba presented her collaborative efforts with NJDEP to develop a statewide ocean acidification monitoring network at the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council and New Jersey Shellfisheries Council (Atlantic Coast and Delaware Bay) meetings.
• RUCOOL faculty are teaching seven courses this fall including Topics in Marine Science, Sea Monsters, Oceanographic Methods & Data Analysis (Bio & Chem), Integrated Ocean Observations, Biology of Living in the Ocean Water Column Ecosystem, Operational Ocean Modeling, and Dynamics on the Continental Shelf.
• Rutgers University was awarded 12 Fellowships by the NJ Wind Institute. RUCOOL students were awarded three of these fellowships including graduate student Samantha Alaimo, and undergraduates Khalid Mujahadeen and Jeury Betances. Congrats!
• Three of our Masters of Operational Oceanography students successfully defended their theses this summer. Congrats to Tim Stolarz, Casey Jones and Courtney Dreyfus! 
• RUCOOL welcomed our 3rd new employee this year. Julia Engdahl will be using her Python data analysis skills in supporting hurricane intensity research, and ocean heat content analysis in the Caribbean. Welcome Julia!
• The R/V Rutgers continues to be used from the Raritan down to Tuckerton and offshore. Captain Chip Haldeman, hosted our Masters of Operational Oceanography Students on multiple training trips for gliders and instrument operations as well as MTS glider camp, numerous glider deployments, and work with the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership. We had 77 passengers in addition to our captain and crew. 
• We still have to check our 25 year history of upwelling, but this summer may very well have been the longest upwelling event in our existence. Upwelling of cold water from the ocean floor to the beach occurs when southwesterly winds bring hot air into our areas during the summer. Air temps were hot, which made the coastal ocean cold. It will be a dataset to study for years to come. It’s interesting when temperatures at Atlantic City are 10oF higher on October 10 than they were on August 10. 
• Seven STEM Ambassadors spent the day with Dr. Hugh Roarty from RUCOOL to learn about the High Frequency radar network that is used to measure ocean surface currents and how drones are used to calibrate the radars.  The STEM Ambassadors will take the knowledge they have gained this past week back to their respective communities and teach-back to their younger peers at local YMCAs, libraries, and afterschool programs.
• RUCOOL Grad Students Sam Alaimo, Malarie O’Brien and Emily Busch showed off the latest technologies in ocean observing at the Rutgers University Marine Field Station’s (RUMFS) 50th Anniversary celebration in September. Hundreds of people attended this weekend celebration.
• RUCOOL grad student Joe Gradone received the 2022 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Award which began in September.  
• Travis Miles gave an invited presentation on the state of Offshore Wind at Princeton Agricultural Society supporting NJAES.

National

• Several RUCOOL faculty and students attended the NYSERDA State of the Science Workshop in Tarrytown, NY : Josh Kohut and Grace Saba chaired a panel entitled Autonomous Solutions responding to the oceanographic and ecological monitoring needs of offshore wind development. Grad Students Courtney Dreyfus and Sam Alaimo presented posters, and Rutgers PhD student, Jacquelyn Veatch, presented a poster entitled Assessing the role of ocean currents on prey concentration from hourly to seasonal scales using lagrangian coherent structures.
• Nicole Waite and Kaycee Coleman, traveled to Sitka, AK to deploy glider RU26d for ocean acidification research in the Gulf of Alaska funded by the Alaska Ocean Observation System  (Grace Saba PI). While in Sitka, Nicole and Kaycee joined the local radio station, KCAW, to talk about the pH glider mission. They also hosted a meet and greet with the Sitka community to talk about RUCOOL, ocean acidification, and RU26d – where everyone was very excited for and welcoming to our cool ocean robot!You can listen to the full radio interview here.
• REU RIOS summer internship Topics ranged from underwater volcanoes, oysters physiology, Antarctic krill and ancient oceans.   Additionally, the interns participated in weekly workshops that develop their career and research aptitude.  The program was co-coordinated by Josh Kohut, who, along with 2 other RUCOOL faculty, directly mentored three of the students.  The summer program concluded with a science symposium in which the students shared their work and celebrated their success. 
• Grace Saba, Josh Kohut, and Travis Miles were invited to be members of the Habitat & Ecosystem Subcommittee for the Regional Wildlife Science Collaborative for Offshore Wind.
• In August, the 4-H National STEM Challenge “Explorers of the Deep” was launched and is now available for sale on the 4-H site.  The kit features a mini-glider that kids can use to learn about density and ballasting, an ocean literacy board game, and communicator activity. Each year, approximately 25,000 STEM Challenge kits are sold, with the potential to engage many more times that number of 4-H club members, after school programs and K-12 students.  Janice McDonnell and the education & outreach team have spent much of the past year developing the kit.  To learn more, visit https://marine.rutgers.edu/4hchallenge/ 
• This spring, the ARIS Broader Impacts toolkit project solicited a call for participants for our second cohort.  Over the summer, a team of reviewers selected 7 institutions from a pool of 18 applicants to join the project with a $25K subcontract to support their efforts..  Cohort members will spend the next 2 years utilizing the ARIS Toolkit at their home institutions, and researching how the toolkit impacts the development of BI projects and proposals at their institution.  
• Hugh Roarty, Rick Lathrop,  and Janice McDonnell received a 17K grant from the NASA Space Grant Program to work with diverse youth in the 4-H STEM Ambassador program.  Youth will be introduced to ecological studies at Duke Farms looking at climate change in agriculture. 
• In August, Travis Miles and Joe Gradone took two summer RIOS intern undergraduates to Teledyne Webb Research (TWR) to expose them to a professional career environment in marine technology. Additionally two representatives of TWR aided in glider training for our summer glider training.

International

• As part of our deep and enduring partnership, the U.S. Embassy Kolonia welcomed scientists from Rutgers University, including RUCOOL’s Oscar Schofield, who are currently conducting a baseline assessment in support of Green Climate Fund-resilient food security for farming households across the FSM.   The United States has contributed one billion dollars to date to the Green Climate Fund.
• Several members of the RUCOOL team attended the Underwater Gliders Meeting in Seattle in September. Mike Crowley and Travis were on the meeting steering committee, while Scott Glenn hosted a two day session on using gliders for tropical cyclone prediction. Grad student Joe Gradone presented a talk on glider measurements and estimations of velocities in the tropics in a session chaired by Mike. 
• Grace Saba and Josh Kohut presented a talk entitled An autonomous-based oceanographic and ecological baseline to inform offshore wind development over the continental shelf off the coast of New Jersey at the ICES Annual Science Meeting in Dublin, Ireland. They were joined by several Rutgers and Monmouth University members of their collaborative offshore wind research team.
• Oscar chaired the Long Term Ecosystem Research at Palmer Station meeting while Grace and Josh were in Ireland and the rest of the glider crew were in Seattle. It was quite the week! 

Newly Funded Research 

• NOAA IOOS (University of Delaware): Mid Atlantic Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observation System (MARACOOS). (Oscar Schofield, $1.4 million, 1 year).
• NJ Board of Public Utilities: BPU Wind Resource Evaluation Modification. (Scott Glenn, Travis Miles, Josh Kohut, $500,581 for 1 year).
• Department of Energy (Duke University): Wildlife and Offshore Wind: A Systems Approach to Research and Risk Assessment for Offshore Wind Development from Maine to North Carolina. (Josh Kout, $31,031, 1 year)
• US Department of Agriculture  National Institute of Food and Agriculture: Hatch. (Kohut, $84,026, 2 years)

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

• Nardelli, S., Gray, P., Schofield, O. 2022. Developing a convolutional neural network to classify phytoplankton images collected with an Imaging FlowCytobot along the West Antarctic Peninsula. Marine Technology Society Journal 56:45-57. DOI: 10.4031/MTSJ.56.5.8.

• Hak Soo Lim, Dongha Kim, Hee Jun Lee, Minwoo Kim, Seung Hwan Jin, Travis N. Miles, Scott Glenn; Typhoon-induced Full Vertical Mixing and Subsequent Intrusion of Yangtze Fresh Waters in the Southern Yellow Sea: Observation with an Underwater Glider and GOCI Ocean Color Imagery. Journal of Coastal Research 1 September 2021; 114 (SI): 171–175. doi: DOI: 10.2112/JCR-SI114-035.1.

• Miles, T.; Zhang, D.; Foltz, G.; Zhang, J.; Meinig, C.; Bringas, F.; Triñanes, J.; Le Hénaff, M.; Aristizabal Vargas, M.; Coakley, S.; et al. Uncrewed Ocean Gliders and Saildrones Support Hurricane Forecasting and Research. Oceanog 2021, 34, 78–81, DOI: 10.5670/oceanog.2021.supplement.02-28.

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