On Thursday November 10th, Craig McLean, Assistant Administrator of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spoke at the Marine and Coastal Sciences as part of a series of talks in celebration of the 250th Anniversary of Rutgers University. McLean gave his talk “Thoughts on the Discovery of a New Water Planet: Earth” to an audience ranging from freshman undergraduates to Distinguished Professors on how he went from being a Zoology student at Rutgers to the position he holds today and what initiatives within NOAA he pushes to further research of our planets oceans. As head of NOAA Research—the research office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—Craig McLean J.D. directs the agency’s entire research enterprise, including all programs and laboratories. Over a 30-year career with NOAA, he has served as a commissioned officer on board hydrographic, oceanographic, and fisheries research ships and was the founding director of its Office of Ocean Exploration. An attorney practicing marine resource law, he has been awarded the U.S. Department of Commerce Silver and Bronze Medals. During his visit, McLean was awarded the Challenger RU-COOL award in recognition of his effort to bridge international communities through the exploration of the world’s ocean. He was also awarded by Rutgers University a Distinguished Alumni award for his devotion to the field of Oceanography.

In Celebration of the 250th anniversary of Rutgers University, Rutgers Today, an online source for news around the university has periodically released articles celebrating Rutgers people and innovations that have changed lives around the world. The following is an article by Ken Branson on the impacts RUCOOL has made world wide over the past two decades. Nearly 20 years ago, Josh Kohut, a rising college senior, walked onto the ground floor of a revolution starting at Rutgers—the art and science of observing the world’s oceans. Kohut got a summer job working for Scott Glenn, a Rutgers University–New Brunswick marine scientist who was just starting to use high-frequency radar designed to hug the surface of the ocean and “see” over the horizon. It was one of several new technologies Glenn and his colleagues at Rutgers would go on to adopt and share with the world over the next two decades, forever changing the field of oceanography and the way scientists understand weather, marine life, and related areas. “The development of ocean observing was championed here,” says Kohut, now an Associate Professor of Marine Science at Rutgers and a cofounder of what was the Rutgers University Coastal Ocean Observation Laboratory that is is now the Rutgers University Center for Ocean Observing Leadership (RU COOL). “The benefits have been in understanding storms, water quality, fisheries, and search and rescue.” For decades, oceanographers had gathered data by observing a spot in the ocean over a period of time with buoys or a tide gauges, or by surveying a swath of ocean by pulling sensors behind a ship. The ocean is under-sampled, to put it mildly,” says Glenn, Distinguished Professor of Marine and Coastal Sciences and another RU COOL cofounder. “We needed spatial data—not just a time series at a point or a shipboard sample that was a one-off. Nobody could afford 1,000 moorings or 1,000 ships.” Glenn and his team first set out to work with satellite imagery, then on the high-frequency radar called CODAR (Coastal Ocean Dynamics Application Radar). Then they started working with sensors on drifters, buoys, and robot gliders. Their work made it possible—and practical—to study different points in the ocean simultaneously. They also decided to make their findings public, posting the data online for others to use for their own work. Other universities “wanted to use [CODAR] data for research papers, but they wouldn’t put it up on their websites for others to look at,” says Donald Barrick, CODAR’s inventor and CEO of CODAR Ocean Sensors. “Rutgers has always been very open about this, not proprietary. They were the beginning in the United States of using our radars for societal applications, not just research.” The work has helped rescuers improve their search-and-rescue strategies, environmental agencies monitor water quality more precisely, fisheries officials manage fisheries better, and meteorologists better understand the underwater dynamics of hurricanes. “Before, we could accurately predict a hurricane’s direction but not the intensity of its landfall,” says Oscar Schofield, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences and another cofounder of RU COOL. “Now, we know how to do that, which has huge implications for emergency preparedness, landuse planning, and lots of other activities.” The program drew international attention in 2009 when Rutgers scientists achieved the world’s first transatlantic crossing of an undersea robotic glider. The media likened the feat to Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, and the glider, dubbed the RU27 Scarlet Knight, was put on display at the Smithsonian Institution. Now, gliders fly underwater in all the world’s ocean basins, and CODARs line both coasts of the United States and are deployed in several other countries. Going forward, RU COOL is at the heart of the effort to manage and understand all that data. In June 2016, the National Science Foundation awarded $11.8 million to Rutgers to design, build, and operate the data system for the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which collects and shares data from more than 800 sophisticated instruments deployed in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The data are transmitted to labs ashore by submarine cable or satellite. The Rutgers team includes RU COOL and the Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute. The goal: provide a holistic view of the world’s oceans. “The view of the world before was that we’re data-limited, and if we just had the data, the ocean would make sense to us,” says Matt Oliver, professor of marine science at the University of Delaware who did his graduate work with RU COOL. “Now, there is so much data going in, we’ve gone from being blind to staring into the sun, and we’re still blind.” Like Oliver, hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students have started their careers at RU COOL to get hands-on experience. In 2009, when the lab sent the Scarlet Knight glider on its historic journey across the Atlantic, the professors often knew no more than their students, and weren’t afraid to admit it. “There were times when [Glenn] just gave us the keys and told us to drive,” student Shannon Harrison told Rutgers Today in 2011. The Rutgers scientists say they have been deliberate in choosing top students in hopes of identifying others from Rutgers who will go on to do revolutionary work. “We need a new generation of oceanographers,” Glenn said. “That’s why we developed our undergraduates as researchers. They’re still explorers. They’re still trying out new things.”

Original article from SEBS NJAES Newsroom, July 14, 2016 by Office of Communications Educators L to R: Tom Grych, Jennifer Smolyn, Dolores Taylor, Carolyn Laymon, Kimberly Kellam, Kelly Terry, Denise Hardoy, Sue Morrow, and Stacia Lothian. Dr. Bridgette Clarkston – workshop co-facilitator from California State University – is bending down in the front row. The best way to teach science is hands on, right? That’s the conventional way, but the polar regions and the obstacle of over 9,000 miles between cutting-edge polar science and the scientists, teachers and students who could benefit from this interaction demand another way. In June, Rutgers University departments of Marine and Coastal Sciences and 4-H Youth Development kicked off a unique Science Investigations (Sci-I) project, a four-day workshop for 21 educators in New Jersey and California who participated first-hand in an open-ended polar science investigation. The response was enthusiastic. “The best part of this project is that it will help me bring real world experiences into my classroom and will support me thinking about how to teach authentic science,” said Matthew Fichter of Cranford Middle School, New Jersey. Through hands-on activities, group discussions, scientist panels and field trips the teachers explored the data to make sense of it and to develop questions and hypothesis that were testable and finally to communicate their initial results. The project is part of the Polar Interdisciplinary Coordinated Education (ICE) funded by the National Science Foundation. Polar-ICE’s mission is to connect polar scientists with broader audiences to further the impact of their research, while connecting educators and students with data and cutting edge science. The workshop helped the educators understand the scientific process using and working with the Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project and its data. Palmer Station is one of three U.S. research stations located in Antarctica and studies polar marine community, its habitats and the plants and animals that live there. The workshop is only the beginning of this Sci-I project, which will target students from a wide range of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. “The exciting part of this project is that the data skills and process of science practices that we collaborated on during the week will be integrated into each classroom differently,” said Kristin Hunter-Thomson, Rutgers 4-H program coordinator in the Department of 4-H Youth Development. “All of it can augment what the teachers are already doing rather than being another thing to add on to their already packed curriculum.” In 2017, up to 60 students from each school will attend the annual Student Polar Research Symposium to present their research to peers, teachers and students from other schools in the project, and polar scientists. These symposia will be held at California State University, Monterey Bay, in February and followed by a similar session at Rutgers in June. “The Department continues with our Summer Science program for urban teens, which is designed to increase knowledge and skills in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) while stimulating interest in STEM career paths,” said Janice McDonnell, associate professor and science engineering technology (SET) agent in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences. “Then we finish out the summer with our EARTH workshop where 20 educators from all over the country will work with polar scientists to create new classroom activities using authentic science data.” original article from SEBS NJAES Newsroom, July 14, 2016 by Office of Communications

After a two and a half year hiatus, Silbo, the first glider of the Challenger Glider Mission is back in the water! Deployed at noon on April 13 2016 right off of Cape Cod Massachusetts , the glider spent roughly a week flying a low angle thruster mission through the shallow waters of the Georges Basin along the shelf. Then Silbo made its way along the Fundian Valley before entering the deep water of the North Atlantic on the evening of April 26th. Now off of the shelf and heading East, the team is discussing the end point for the mission. The overall goal is to complete another crossing of the North Atlantic, however where we want to set the finish line is still up in the air. In 2009 the Scarlet Knight, a 200m glider crossed from New Jersey to Northern Spain. The potential plans as proposed by Ben Allsup (TWR) are as follows: Scenario 1: Falmouth, United Kingdom – 4400km in deep water, 320km along the shelf. This scenario would be interesting as Silbo was deployed from the town of Falmouth Massachusetts and would be nice to connect the two cities. Scenario 2: Galway , Ireland – 4300km deep water, 100 km on the shelf. This choice would include a partnership with our friends at the Marine Institute in Galway. Scenario 3: Canaries – 4500km deep water, 10km on shelf. This brings Silbo back to where he made land fall in the summer of 2012 after deployment from Iceland and reunites him with Antonio at ULPGC and the friends at PLOCAN. Scenario 4: West Coast of Norway – 5512km deep water, 80km shelf and shallow area around the Faroe Islands. This would be the most difficult path and is mot unlikely. Scenario 5: Iceland – 4200km deep 85km along shelf. This route returns Silbo from his initial deployment location from June 2011, however the consensus seems to be that Iceland doesnt feel far enough across the ocean for it to be a full crossing. Scenario 6: Mallorca – 5700km deep, 50km on shelf. This is the pie in the sky route which involves the very tricky passage through the Straight of Gibraltar. For more information about the Challenger Glider Mission check out the Challenger Glider Mission Website

Congratulations to Liam Ramsay (School of Engineering) for winning the Rutgers Internship Excellence Award (SEBS) for his intern work with RUCOOL. 7 students were honores at the Career Knights of Distinction Awards Dinner on Wednesday 5/4/2016. Liam’s work focused on dead-reckoning improvement as well as underwater flight performance & optimization. To see more pictures from the event, check out the album on our Flickr Page 

On July 2nd, Andrenette Morrison and Liam Ramsay visited Teledyne Marine Systems in North Falmouth, MA. They met with Teledyne official, Clara Hulbert, who provided a short tour of the facility. These interns were briefly educated on the different oceanographic technologies built there including the G2 Slocum Gliders. Andrenette and Liam will return to this facility later this summer to get a more in depth look at Teledyne Marine Systems.

Dr. Scott Glenn and Dr. Hugh Roarty travelled to Wuhan, China for the Third Ocean Radar Conference for Asia-Pacific meeting this past April. Dr. Hugh Roarty and Dr. Scott Glenn travelled to China in April 2016 to speak on their experience of using High Frequency radar in a coastal ocean observing system. The first meeting was the MTS/IEEE OCEANS16 conference in Shanghai. While in Shanghai they met with Rutgers alumna Yi Xu who is Director of the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER) Regional Project Office located at East China Normal University. They then travelled to Wuhan China to speak at and participate in the 3rd Ocean Radar Conference for Asia-Pacific. Lastly, Dr. Glenn delivered a talk at the second meeting of the Coastal Ocean Radar Network (CORNet) for China. The following are the talks given by Drs. Glenn and Roarty: 2016 Meeting Date Presenter(s) Title of Presentation Coastal Ocean Radar Network (CORNet) Wuhan, China April 17, 2016 Scott Glenn & Hugh Roarty HF Radar Applications in the Coastal Ocean Wuhan University Wuhan, China April 16, 2016 Scott Glenn & Hugh Roarty The Global High Frequency Radar Network Ocean Radar Currents for Asia-Pacific (ORCA) Wuhan, China April 15, 2016 Hugh Roarty Evaluation of Environmental Data for Searth and Rescue Scott Glenn The Mid-Atlantic Coastal Ocean Observing System: Hurricanes, HF Radars, & HFR Network East China Normal University Shanghai, China April 11, 2016 Scott Glenn & Hugh Roarty The Mid-Atlantic Coastal Ocean Observing System: Application to Mean and Extreme Conditions MTS/IEEE Oceans 16 Shanghai, China April 11, 2016 Hugh Roarty Evaluation of Environmental Data for Searth and Rescue April 12, 2016 Scott Glenn Stratified Coastal Ocean Interactions with Tropical Cyclones