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Texas A&M University
Industry: Education
Number of terms: 34386
Number of blossaries: 0
Company Profile:
Founded in 1876, Texas A&M University is a U.S. public and comprehensive university offering a wide variety of academic programs far beyond its original label of agricultural and mechanical trainings. It is one of the few institutions holding triple federal designations as a land-, sea- and ...
A planned mission that apparently collapsed under its own financial weight and never got off the ground.
Industry:Earth science
A plastic sampling bottle with water tight clsoures at top and bottom used to collect seawater samples for discrete chemical and biological measurements. It is equipped with a subsampling spigot and an air vent and can be triggered at pre-determined depths to collect samples. It is made of polyvinylchloride (PVC), an unreactive substance, to minimize possible contamination of highly sensitive measurements.
Industry:Earth science
A PMEL program. COAST was conducted from Nov. 30 to Dec. 15, 1993 and the purpose was to collect the observations needed to document and ultimately anticipate the influence of orography on mesoscale weather phenomena in coastal environments. The objectives were: to identify conditions that contribute to the development of coastally trapped disturbances during periods of strong but relatively uniform onshore flow; and to observe the mesoscale structure of fronts and other features associated with baroclinic cyclones over the open sea, and describe their evolution as they come under the influence of orography.
Industry:Earth science
A positive feedback loop in the atmosphere wherein an increase in temperature increases the water holding capacity. This will lead to an increase in the amount of atmospheric water vapor which, being a greenhouse gas, will in turn lead to another temperature increase. This process is better understood in the lower troposphere where there is reasonable certainty as to the feedback process. The upper atmosphere, while not as well understood in this regard, has a preponderance of evidence pointing to this. The temperature change is not uniform with height and the resulting changes in the vertical temperature gradient can partially compensate for the water vapor feedback.
Industry:Earth science
A post-LGM European climate regime where the retreat of the ice was reversed. The evidence for this event, which started at about 9000 BC, is strongest for the North Atlantic Basin, although there is some evidence for it in other parts of the world. The most probable hypothesis as to the cause of this involves the significant amount of glacial meltwater inducing changes in the atmosphere-ocean circulation, i.e. the outflow of low-salinity water into the subpolar North Atlantic may have affected the rate of deep-sea mixing and thus the production rate of North Atlantic Deep Water. It was preceded by the Allerod oscillation and followed by the Pre-Boreal period.
Industry:Earth science
A primitive equation general ocean circulation model developed at GFDL. It is intended to be a flexible tool for exploring ocean and coupled air-sea applications over a wide range of space and time scales.
Industry:Earth science
A procedure wherein local or regional climate characteristics are inferred from the output of GCMs that don’t explicitly resolve such scales. Statistical relationships between observed local climate variables, e.g. surface air temperature, precipitation, etc., and observed large-scale predictors are developed and then applied to the same large-scale predictors in the GCM output to predict the local climate variables. This method has been shown to produce local temperature and precipitation change fields that were significantly different and had a finer spatial scale structure than those generated by directly interpolating large-scale GCM fields.
Industry:Earth science
A process of sea ice development in the Antarctic. The pancake ice pieces start with a diameter of tens of centimeters, but aggregate with loose frazil ice crystals through wind and wave action to increase in diameter, and raft with other pieces to increase in thickness. This can cause rapid growth to a few meters in diameter and up to 1 meter thick. The pancakes eventually can freeze together into either large floes or a consolidated ice cover.
Industry:Earth science
A process wherein deep convection and the formation of bottom waters ceases if the ocean surface salinity decreases sufficiently via enhanced freshwater input. This process is thought to have shut down the thermohaline overturning cell in the Atlantic in the past.
Industry:Earth science
A process–oriented study of the VAMOS element of CLIVAR. EPIC focuses on the eastern Pacific Ocean, specifically the cold tongue ITCZ region and the stratus dreck region. The goal is to understand coupled ocean–atmosphere processes in these regions with the intent of building toward better models and prediction.
Industry:Earth science