2009 News

Prof. Fuqing's Zhang's research group runs one millionth job on TACC supercomputer

— posted on Nov 25, 2009 09:48 AM

"Bill Barth, director of TACC's HPC group, said, "The demand for time on Ranger has been very high and instrumental to making TeraGrid the nation's largest resource for open science computational research. The system has run more than 600 million central processing unit hours so far." As for the user who ran the millionth job, Barth said it was a small post-processing job (16 processors) completed by Dr. Yonghui Weng, research associate, in Professor Fuqing Zhang's hurricane research group at the Pennsylvania State University Department of Meteorology."

"Sea level rise alters Bay's salinity"

— posted on May 18, 2009 11:26 AM

Research by Dr. Ray Najjar and colleagues at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science focuses on the Chesapeake Bay.

Lungs getting a breather from ozone

— posted on Jul 22, 2009 01:35 PM

"There's been a sort of semi-permanent area of low pressure over the Great Lakes for most of the summer season, and as the wind spins around that low, we've just been getting cloudier and cooler weather than normal," said Bill Ryan, a meteorology professor at Pennsylvania State University and consultant to the EPA. "The other thing that's going on is, our ozone concentrations have fallen over the past five or six years. What we call the regional background ozone that comes into our big cities from the west with the prevailing winds has been significantly reduced."

Tornado season puzzles scientists

— posted on Aug 12, 2009 02:21 PM

Assistant professor Yvette Richardson, one of the leaders of the Penn State team that is part of Vortex2, said the year was an anomaly when it came to tornadoes.

Hurricane predictions gain ground

— posted on May 18, 2009 11:26 AM

"I am not sure we know what the limits are right now," said Fuqing Zhang, a professor of meteorology at Penn State University. "I think we will continue seeing improvements in track forecasts, especially in extended range."

Pennsylvania badly in need of April showers

— posted on May 18, 2009 11:26 AM

Mercer County, bordering Ohio, is the only entire county currently averaging above normal precipitation for 2009, said Paul Knight, Penn State climatologist and meteorology instructor. Other western counties, such as Crawford, Venango, Butler, Lawrence and Erie, all have measured near normal for rain and snow so far this year.