Rui Mei successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation and took a postdoctoral job at the Oak Ridge National Lab. Congratulations Rui! Well done!

Guiling attended the AMS annual meeting at New Orleans, and gave two presentations: (1) Soil Moisture-Precipitation Relationship over the U.S.: Results from Observations, Reanalysis Data, and Numerical Models; (2)Role of Vegetation Dynamics in Precipitation Variability in the Amazon Region. The research was supported by funding from NOAA and NSF.

Guiling visited Hohai University and Tsinghua University, and gave a presentation on “Quantifying the coupling between soil moisture and precipitation: Recent progress and challenges”.
Rui Mei & Shanshan Sun attended the AGU Fall meeting in San Francisco. Rui presented results on land-atmosphere coupling strength in the United States based on comparisons among observations, re-analysis data, global climate models, and regional climate models; Shanshan presented results on quantifying soil moisture’s impact on precipitation using a feedback parameter and the complications related to the presence of low-frequency variability attributable to large-scale oceanic forcing. Their research was supported by funding from NOAA and NSF.   

Congratulations to Farzan Ahmed for successfully defending his M.S. thesis! Farzan’s research focused on Statistical downscaling of daily output from GCMs and RCMs future predictions for the U.S. Northeast (to provide data needed for invasive species prediction). In collaboration with Dr. John Silander’s group in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, this work was supported by the USDA Invasive Species project and the UConn CESE (Center for Environmental Science and Engineering).  
Rui Mei attended the WCRP Open Science Conference in Denver (Colorado), where Rui presented his research on the impact of soil moisture on subsequent precipitation based on observational data and the comparison of this relationship among models, observations, and reanalysis data. This work was support by the NOAA CPPA program.

Huanghe Gu completed his one-year visit and returned to Hohai University to continue this PhD research. What a productive year it was! Huanghe, we enjoyed having you here! 
Welcome to Di (Lena) Liu, a visiting PhD student from Hohai University. She will be here with us for one year!
Welcome to Di Wu! Di is a M.S. student co-advised by Drs. Anagnostou and Wang.

The lab welcomed Jeehee Kim, a new PhD student, and Miao Yu, a postdoctoral research associate. Jeehee got her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Environmental Sciences and Engineering (focusing on hydrometeorology) fromEwha Womans University. Miao got her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degree in Atmospheric Sciences (focusing on dynamic vegetation and modeling) from Nanjing Institute of Meteorology.

Dr. Liangzhi You and Dr. Jeremy Pal visited the lab during the 1st and 2nd weeks of June, respectively, to launch our NSF projects!  Thanks to Liangzhi and Jeremy for the extremely productive discussions and the long hours working in the lab! 
 
The lab welcomed Dana Parr, a new PhD student. Dana got his M.S. degree from Yale University and B.A. from Wesleyan University. Dana, welcome on board!

Former lab member Clement Alo (PhD, 2009) accepted a tenure-track faculty job offer and will move to Montclair State University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2011. Congratulations Clement!

Former lab member Dagang Wang (PhD, 2007), after his time at NOAA, moved to Sun Yat-Sen University as an Associate Professor. Congratulations Dagang!

Former lab member Yeonjoo Kim (PhD, 2006), after her time at NASA GISS, moved to take a Research Scientist position in the Korean Environment Institute. Congratulations, Yeonjoo! We’ll miss you!