NASA Awards Cooperative Agreement To University of Maryland

NASA has awarded a cooperative funding agreement to the University of Maryland College Park, College Park, Md., to continue collaborative research in the field of earth systems science.

This $36,334,811 million, five-year agreement funds an already established partnership between NASA’s Earth Sciences Division located at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the university’s Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) to study and forecast impacts of the Earth’s connected systems on global and regional environment, weather and climate.

The agreement will continue to give NASA Goddard’s Earth Sciences Division access to ESSIC’s academic and research faculty, students, and its partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) newly opened National Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in the University of Maryland M Square Research Park and Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS).

Research to be funded by the new agreement includes study of aerosols and human-generated pollutants that travel long distances through the atmosphere and oceans; ways to improve drought monitoring; real time analysis to detect falling snow on a variety of surfaces; and determining how satellite observations can better diagnose ground level air pollution.

Other projects include an on-going activity to make a global flood and landslide technique available for decision-making to reduce disaster around the globe; and how models and observations are being used together to investigate how the Chesapeake Bay breeze affects surface air pollution levels and deposits over the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov