For the past year our small EEE team in Microsoft External Research has been working with some fabulous researchers in Brazil looking at the rainforest ecosystem. The Brazilian Rainforest Sensor Network project—a joint effort of the University of São Paulo, Johns Hopkins University, the São Paulo Research Foundation, the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, and MSR is looking at the carbon flux in the rainforest and how to capture and analyze the data. You can see and hear more about the project in the video and blog post linked below.
Monitoring the Brazilian Rainforest with a Sensor Network Last week, at the Microsoft Research sixth annual Latin American Faculty Summit in Guaruja, Brazil, Rob Fatland, program manager with Microsoft Research, and Humberto da Rocha, professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the Universidade de São Paulo, led an intriguing presentation about their Atlantic Rainforest Micrometeorology Sensor Network Pilot Study. It’s a study that took place a mere 130 miles from where the Faculty Summit was held—a local project that could have broad environmental impact worldwide.
Last week, at the Microsoft Research sixth annual Latin American Faculty Summit in Guaruja, Brazil, Rob Fatland, program manager with Microsoft Research, and Humberto da Rocha, professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the Universidade de São Paulo, led an intriguing presentation about their Atlantic Rainforest Micrometeorology Sensor Network Pilot Study. It’s a study that took place a mere 130 miles from where the Faculty Summit was held—a local project that could have broad environmental impact worldwide.
External Research Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
Today is the 2nd anniversary of the launch of WWT – congrats to Jonathan, Curtis, and the rest of the small team. Besides the initial windows client (that lead to Scoble’s post - Microsoft researchers make me cry) there is the web client (silverlight), a web control, and the Bing Map WWT addin.
There is still more to come…
WorldWide Telescope
Here’s a really good article on KQED’s Climate Watch on Albedo and why it’s important in a warming planet – it’s also really good to see Jeff Dozier’s work highlighted in the article. btw, last year Jeff was awarded the Jim Gray eScience Award, which recognizes innovators whose work has made an especially significant contribution to the field of data-intensive computing, at the Microsoft Research eScience Workshop.
Another article on Jeff’s work - Jim Gray eScience Award Recipient Unlocks Secrets in the Snow
What's an Albedo? (And Why You Should Care) April 29, 2010 · Posted By Molly Samuel Jeff Dozier approaches an instrument tower on Mammoth Mountain. Photo: Molly Samuel When Jeff Dozier, a hydrologist at UC Santa Barbara, goes to work, he gets to enjoy quite a view. His snow lab is perched halfway up Mammoth Mountain in the central Sierra. We took a gondola to get up there; the other passengers were skiers and snowboarders itching to get out on the freshly fallen snow. But the instrument platform from which we enjoyed views of the White Mountains is really only half the story. Dozier’s computer lab has much less of a view. In fact, it has no view. It’s buried under the snow, accessible only through what he calls a “Santa Claus entrance” (in the picture above, you can see the entrance–it's the white tubular "chimney" extending down into the snow from the center of the platform). The snow lab, operated by both UCSB and the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), uploads information about the snowpack to a website every fifteen minutes. You can see nearly real-time readings on, among other things, snow depth, temperature, humidity, and radiation. <more>
April 29, 2010 · Posted By Molly Samuel
Jeff Dozier approaches an instrument tower on Mammoth Mountain. Photo: Molly Samuel
When Jeff Dozier, a hydrologist at UC Santa Barbara, goes to work, he gets to enjoy quite a view. His snow lab is perched halfway up Mammoth Mountain in the central Sierra. We took a gondola to get up there; the other passengers were skiers and snowboarders itching to get out on the freshly fallen snow.
But the instrument platform from which we enjoyed views of the White Mountains is really only half the story. Dozier’s computer lab has much less of a view. In fact, it has no view. It’s buried under the snow, accessible only through what he calls a “Santa Claus entrance” (in the picture above, you can see the entrance–it's the white tubular "chimney" extending down into the snow from the center of the platform).
The snow lab, operated by both UCSB and the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), uploads information about the snowpack to a website every fifteen minutes. You can see nearly real-time readings on, among other things, snow depth, temperature, humidity, and radiation.
<more>
What’s an Albedo? (And Why You Should Care) | KQED's Climate Watch
Today’s Bing Image of the day is the Cats Eye Nebula – if you want to explore it more you can see it in the WorldWide Telescope Web Client
Bing