More PhDs finding jobs as tenure-track professors, study says #GlobeAndMail

More PhDs finding jobs as tenure-track professors, study says
Globe & Mail, 25 January 2016

"A third of graduates with doctoral degrees from Ontario universities are in tenure-track positions somewhere in the world, with half of them working as professors in Canada, the study from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario found."

When I was worried about my future as a graduate student my thesis advisor told me “the good people always get jobs.” I’m glad to see despite all the current gloom and doom the future for our graduates students is so encouraging and indeed “some things never change.”

Determining Rayleigh Scatter Lidar Temperatures Using an Optimal Estimation Method

Middle atmosphere temperature profile retrieved using an OEM (red curve) compared to the traditional analysis using 2 detector channels (blue and green curves).

• A lay summary of the paper is available at the Optical Society of America’s Spotlight on Optics.

We have recently published a paper in Applied Optics detailing a new method for retrieving temperature from Rayleigh lidar measurements using an optimal estimation method (OEM). The OEM allows a full systematic and random uncertainty budget to be done for each retrieval, specifies the height to which the retrieval is insensitive to the a priori temperature profile and gives the vertical resolution of the retrieval as a function of height. The ability to determine the full uncertainty budget is particularly important for using the Rayleigh-lidar temperature measurements for determining long-term changes, particularly for multi-instrument networks like NDACC or GRUAN. The method uses a free community-supported OEM solver developed by P. Eriksson and colleagues (qpack, part of the ARTS retrieval software package). 

We encourage you to try this method, and we are available to help answer your questions as you implement it. 

Bob and Alexander 

• Get the paper at Applied Optics: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ao/abstract.cfm?URI=ao-54-8-1872&origin=search 
• The paper is Open Access, if you can't retrieve it at the above link try: http://drp.rjsi.ca/1lkj0/G6dBktZZ 

Canadian SciSat Finds a Delay in Ozone Recovery from The Globe...

Canadian SciSat Finds a Delay in Ozone Recovery

from The Globe and Mail: Ozone-destroying chemical making comeback

Good news, bad news:

bad news: changes in circulation are causing “old” air with high levels of ozone-destroying hydrogen chloride to persist in the stratosphere, slowing ozone recovery due to CFCs.

good news: the Canadian SCISAT made the measurements that enabled this study, yet another success from this mission. Congratulations to Profs. Kaley Walker, Tom McElroy, Peter Bernath and the SCISAT team.

more on SCISAT from the Canadian Space Agency

via https://dayone.me/10rczmL

Changing Luminosity in Saturn’s Rings Kudo to Crow Shannon, a...

Changing Luminosity in Saturn’s Rings

Kudo to Crow Shannon, a co-author in a recent study published in Icarus about the changing luminosity of Saturn’s F ring. This exciting research story was recently reported in the LA Times. You can read the article here.

OK Shannon now it is time to go back to the chaos at Echo Base ;-)

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

via https://dayone.me/Ys1zXQ

The Crows at Summer Camp

The Crows at Summer Camp on Flickr.
the young crows recently enjoyed a week at the Connaught Summer Institute in Arctic Science.