Category: Research

NEGAUNEE — Snow. It’s part of this area that the world has learned to embrace and, to those lucky enough to live here, cherish. NASA is another one of these admirers and the agency has employed a team to research snow in Marquette County.

Mark Kulie, an assistant professor in the Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences at Michigan Tech, is one of the researchers enlisted by the agency to deploy twelve high-tech precipitation gauges between Marquette Mountain and Ishpeming.

Read more and watch the video at ABC 10 News, by Alyssa Lambert.

In Print

Michigan Tech Satellite Snowfall Research

Mark Kulie (GMES) co-authored a manuscript entitled “Evaluation of the GPM-DPR Snowfall Detection Capability: Comparison with CloudSat-CPR” that was recently published in Atmospheric Research.

On the Road

Mark Kulie (GMES) is attending the 98th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. Kulie is presenting a talk entitled “Profiling Radar and Snow Microphysical Properties from Extended Ground Observations in the Upper Great Lakes” in the 19th Symposium on Meteorological Observations and Instrumentation.

Carnegie Natural History program looks at science of measuring snow

HOUGHTON — Understanding and recording snowfall is a complicated and developing area of research everyone can contribute to.

Mark Kulie, a Michigan Tech assistant professor, spoke on measuring global snowfall Tuesday at the latest program of the Natural History series at Carnegie Museum.

“This is one of the premier snowfall areas in the United States that is not located at an elevation of 10,000 feet or higher,” Kulie said.
Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Kali Katerberg.

Keweenaw snow invisible to weather monitoring

Radar difficulties, shallow clouds and high variability between regions are a few of the disrupting factors.

Snowfall researcher and Michigan Tech assistant professor Mark Kulie highlighted a few of these issues at a Tuesday presentation at the Carnegie Museum.

“This is a fantastic local laboratory to study snow in,” Kulie said. “It defines life here throughout the winter months.”

Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Kali Katerberg.

Are you interested in becoming our next Lecturer in Mining Engineering? I promise you’ll be joining a GREAT team! Details can be found here.

Simon Carn (GMES/EPSSI), is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $71,762 research and development grant from the University of Maryland.

The project is titled “Advancing NASA OMI SO2 Product: Enabling New Science Analyses, Applications, and Long-Term, Multi-Satellite Monitoring.”

This is the first year of a three-year project potentially totaling $219,881.

Mark Kulie (GMES/EPSSI/GLRC) presented an invited talk entitled “Snowfall in the GPM Era: Assessing GPM Snowfall Retrievals Using Independent Spaceborne, Reanalysis, and Ground-Based Datasets” at the 2017 NASA Precipitation Measurement Missions Science Team Meeting in San Diego, CA.

He also presented a poster entitled “Ground-Based Profiling Radar Applications for Spaceborne Snowfall Retrievals” at the same meeting.

Ted Bornhorst, executive director of the A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum, and professor (GMES) recently published an article in Minerals – an Open access Mining and Mineral Processing Journal. Bornhorst’s article was titled “Copper isotope constraints on the genesis of the Keweenaw Peninsula native copper district, Michigan, USA” and was co-authored by Ryan Mathur, professor and chair of geology at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.

Minerals 2017, 7(10), 185; doi:10.3390/min7100185

Abstract

The Keweenaw Peninsula native copper district of Michigan, USA is the largest concentration of native copper in the world. The copper isotopic composition of native copper was measured from stratabound and vein deposits, hosted by multiple rift-filling basalt-dominated stratigraphic horizons over 110 km of strike length. READ MORE

Smithsonian.com reported on the Global Volcanism Program, a study of the inner workings of volcanoes. Simon Carn (GMES) is one of the program’s researchers.

How Earthquakes and Volcanoes Reveal the Beating Heart of the Planet

The Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program has stitched together a visual archive of the world’s earthquakes and volcanoes

To illustrate these dynamic patterns, the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, hosted within the National Museum of Natural History, has created a time-lapse animation of the world’s earthquakes, eruptions and emissions since 1960. Drawing from the first compiled database of sulfur emissions dating to 1978, the animations show how the seemingly random activity of volcanoes and earthquakes form consistent global patterns over time. Understanding those patterns gives researchers insight into how these dramatic events are entwined with the inner workings of our planet.

Earthquakes and volcanoes can conjure up images of widespread destruction. But for those who study Earth’s deepest reaches, like Elizabeth Cottrell, a research geologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and director of the Global Volcanism Program, volcanoes are also “windows to the interior.”

“Global satellite monitoring of volcanoes will transform our understanding of gas fluxes from Earth’s interior to exterior in the coming decade,” says Cottrell, who has been working along with Michigan Tech researcher Simon Carn and data manager Ed Venzke to incorporate volcanic emissions into the Smithsonian database since 2012.

Read more at Smithsonian, by Rachel E. Gross.

A geologist with the University of Kerala has collaborated with a U.S.-based geological engineer to prepare the Landslide Atlas of Kerala. The atlas, co-authored by K.S. Sajinkumar, Assistant Professor, Department of Geology, University of Kerala, and Thomas Oommen, Associate Professor, Michigan Technological University, U.S., depicts the spatial and temporal distribution of landslips and potentially hazardous locations in the Western Ghats.

The atlas, prepared after an extensive mapping process that lasted for a year, has used the latest tools of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Public Works Minister G. Sudhakaran will formally launch the Landslide Atlas of Kerala at the Department of Geology on the Karyavattom campus of the university on September 19, 2017. The Geological Society of India is the publisher of the atlas.

Read more at Nyoooz.