Newsletter No. 12, FALL 1995

Department of Oceanography Chair, Dr. David Thistle
Newsletter Editor, Designer, and HTML Author: Laura Young

IN THIS ISSUE:

View from the Bridge

The chair's column

Alumnus Busalacchi is "grad made good"

Feature article

Department ranked 9th in national study

The results of a National Research Council evaluation

On Staff

Welcomes and farewells

Hunley: 17-year current meter master

Feature article

Project Reports:

In the field

Publications

New grants

Professional Activities: Honors, presentations and service

Alumni Updates, Degrees Conferred



Alumnus Busalacchi is "grad made good"

By Laura Young and Dr. Joseph Siry

micron Delta Kappa, the National Leadership Honor Society, saluted Oceanography graduate Antonio Busalacchi Jr. as one of three Florida State University Grads Made Good during Homecoming celebrations '95.

The award recognizes Busalacchi's extensive and notable career achievements since he left Florida State University in 1982. Busalacchi, now chief of NASA's Goddard Laboratory for Hydrospheric Processes, received a B.S. in physics at FSU in 1977, a M.S. in oceanography in 1980, and a Ph.D. in oceanography in 1982.

The Department of Oceanography, and especially his major professor James J. O'Brien, is proud that a student from our program has achieved such distinction.

O'Brien recollects that, even as a graduate student, Busalacchi's work was advanced and impressive. "He essentially did three Ph.D.'s for his degree," says O'Brien. "His Oceanography committee wanted to give him a Ph.D. for his masters work, but he said no."



After receiving his doctoral degree, Busalacchi was hired by NASA as an oceanographer, turning down a post-doctoral position offered to him at MIT. He moved up the ranks quickly at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, attaining his current position as a laboratory chief at age 35. In this capacity, he furnishes scientific direction to a broad, multi -faceted program involving the oceans, the cryosphere, and the hydrological sciences, as well as major thrusts in observational science in both the laboratory and the field. In 1991, he received the prestigious Arthur S. Flemming Award, as one of five outstanding young scientists in the entire Federal Government.

Worldwide planner

Busalacchi has become a driving force in a whole range of international and national research programs dealing with global change and climate, particularly as affected by the oceans. He has provided outstanding leadership in the defining and planning of major research endeavors in many contexts.

Since 1989 he has served on the National Academy of Sciences /National Research Council (NAS/NRC) Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) Advisory Panel. For the past three years, he has been a member of the NAS/NRC Panel on Near-Term Development of Operational Ocean Observations. He has served as Chairman of the Workshop on In-Situ and Satellite Measurements in Support of Short -Program on Seasonal to Interannual Prediction, as Chairman of the SeaWIFS Ocean Color Data Source Evaluation Board, and as Chairman of the NASA HPCC NRA Earth Science Selection Panel.

He has also served as a member of the TOGA Coupled Ocean-Atmo
sphere Response Experiment (COARE) Science Working Group, the Organizing Committee for the Western Pacific International Meeting and Workshop on TOGA-COARE held in Noumea, New Caledonia, in 1989, the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program Surface and Upper Ocean Observation Project Science Team, the NSF Equatorial Theoretical Panel, the NOAA Long-Term Ocean Observations Review Panel, and the Scientific Task Group for the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction that was highlighted in President Bush's response to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).

Busalacchi's advancement as an administrator has not kept him from continuing to be an unusually prolific, practicing scientist. He is presently a principal investigator or co-PI with colleagues from Lamont -Doherty Earth Observatory, the University of Hawaii, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and France for the ocean-related remote sensing missions involving the TOPEX/Poseidon altimeters, the NASA scatterometer (NSCAT), the SeaWIFS ocean-color imager, and the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM).

He is most excited now about his work on initializing coupled ocean -atmosphere models for predicting El Niño. In the past, a serial approach has been used in which ocean models were run first, then atmosphere models were run, and finally a coupled ocean-atmosphere model was run. By initializing with a coupled manner from the start, Busalacchi and his collaborators (Dake Chen, Mark Cane, and Steve Zebiak) are seeing that predictions can be made a year beyond the previous nine- to twelve -month prediction skill!

On average, he is an author of three refereed publications per year. Ten of his recent papers were cited 93 times in the scientific literature! Moreover, for the past 10 years, he has been an associate editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research/Oceans. He also serves as Adjunct Professor of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, where he advises graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Busalacchi's combined roles of researcher, advisor, and director may well be unique within the Agency, if not the entire Federal Government. Busalacchi feels that his work "bridges the gap between the wet-footed (observational), the theoretical, and the remote sensing people."

From quarries to queries

Busalacchi became interested in oceans as early as age 12, when he first learned scuba diving. His explorations took him from quarries in Wisconsin to Florida waters. "I was intrigued with oceans because they were a part of the earth that we didn't know a lot about but which were important to life on earth," he says. "Florida State was one of the few places as an undergraduate that I could get exposure to oceanography. As a product of the 60s and the space race, I guess it is ironic that I ended up getting a job at NASA."

Busalacchi married his high school sweetheart, Connie. They and their seven-year-old son, Tony III, live in Maryland but spend a part of every year at a second home in Vail, Colorado.

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Department ranked 9th in national study of graduate research programs

THE NATIONAL RESEARCH Council's evaluation of 3,634 research -doctorate programs in 41 fields has placed the Department of Oceanography at FSU ninth among 26 oceanography programs in the study. The review also indicates that the program has improved in quality over the past five years.

"We are very pleased to learn that the excellence that we had known about for some time has been recognized by our colleagues," says Dr. David Thistle, chair of the department.

The NRC's study is based on a survey of nearly 8,000 faculty members conducted in spring 1993. Respondents were asked to rate 50 programs in their field on two "reputational" criteriathe "scholarly quality of program faculty" and the "effectiveness of program in educating research scholars/scientists."

This study, the nation's most comprehensive assessment of university doctoral programs, is used as a guide to programs both by those who finance research projects and by students choosing graduate programs. It is also used by faculty members and administrators to assess academic departments according to the quality of scholars and their academic effectiveness. Copies may be obtained by sending $63.95 to the National Academy Press, 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20418.

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On Staff

Candace Biggerstaff joined Dr. Chanton's staff as a full-time research assistant in September. Candace comes to the department from the University of Florida, where she earned her B.S. in chemical engineering.

Lyndsay Heiman left Dr. Thistle's lab in August to pursue a doctorate in religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Lauren Porter, a senior jointly majoring in biology and anthropology is working with him now as a lab assistant.

Temporary staff hired in November 1995 to help the Current Meter Facility staff prepare for a major cruise planned for March 1996 include Arthur Mack Noval and Wesley Moore.



Hunley: 17-year current meter master

by Laura Young

DAVE HUNLEY CAME ON BOARD with FSU's Department of Oceanography when its Current Meter Facility was established in 1978. "Without Dave's work," says Dr. Wilton Sturges, then department chairman, "I don't think our current-meter shop would have gotten off the ground. He is a very good worker, and a fine shipmate at sea."

Dave's most recent promotion this September gained him the status of Senior Engineer. In seventeen years, he has refitted, redesigned, cleaned up, upgraded, or outfitted current meters hundreds of times for FSU's considerable research involving ocean currents.

"I've gone on virtually every cruise that ever deployed or recovered meters (at FSU)," says Dave. "Once you deploy a meter, it's there. If I put a meter out and it doesn't work, it's eighteen months later before we know if it fails or floods or the release doesn't work. It's not like your computerwhen it crashes you reboot. I only get one shot at it."

FSU's first current meters were junk Navy instruments, which Dave fitted with redesigned compasses and updated data-logger electronics to reduce their energy use. These Burst Sampling Current Meters (BSCMs), which date from the 1960s, have undergone a series of transformations in Dave's hands over the years. He recently designed a new electronic card to modify the meters to measure conductivity for collecting salinity data.

Dave also has worked to customize the acoustic releases, which have acoustic transponders that operate "like a garage door opener" and free the meter from the anchor so that it floats up for surface retrieval. Originally the releases were designed to be throw-away items, but Dave redesigned them to last two years.

Dr. David Thistle has special praise for Dave's skill and devotion on the job. "During a study of the effects that near-bottom flow had on sediment-dwelling organisms in the deep sea," says Thistle, "we needed to mark the study site with an acoustic beacon so that ALVIN could find it quickly at the start of each dive. The Current Meter Facility supplied the beacon, and both Dave and I talked to the Alvin people to get the frequencies that the sub could hear. As we were steaming out of port, Dave was yarning with one of the ALVIN techs about the beacon and found out that the WHOI-based techs had given us the wrong frequencies. Dave had to stay up all night to adjust the beacon so that it would be ready for us the next day. That's service!"

Dave also has worked on a number of projects for Dr. Bill Burnett, who says that "he was the driving force behind the electronics for our 'rotating disc electrodeposition units,' which are becoming world famous." The units, which took a year to create and were constructed by Engineer Jim Winne, are used to prepare lab samples for measuring radioactivity.

Currently, Dave and the rest of the Current Meter Facility staff have their hands full getting meters ready for Dr. Georges Weatherly's study of currents off Cape Hatteras, where shallow waters promise rough conditions for the equipment.

"This will be by far the most complex and difficult situation we've faced," admits Hunley. "There are going to be some real challenges with this one. The meters will be within five meters of the surface. It's a heavily fished area with a lot of trawling and big ship traffic. Plus, there's the sheer mass of the equipment (14 moorings with 67 major pieces of equipment, 35 of which are new to the facility)!"

But Dave seems to be keeping this project in perspective with all the others.

"They're all adventures," he says.

Dave lives on Oyster Bay near Shell Point, Florida, with his wife Pat. He spends much of his off-time back on the water, fishing from his 25 1/2-foot Chriscraft The Heathen.

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in the field

Effect of phosphogypsum on groundwater

Postdoctoral Research Associate Carter Hull and Research Assistant Alan Baker spent a week in November at the Piney Point gypsum stack, sampling wells and making hydrographic measurements. The fieldwork is being done in support of the project sponsored by the Florida Institute of Phosphate Research "How Does Phosphogypsum Storage Affect Groundwaters," Drs. Bill Burnett and Carter Hull, P.I.'s.

Groundwater seepage into Florida Bay

Drs. Jeff Chanton and Bill Burnett, with Ph.D. candidate Reide Corbett and Masters candidates Kevin Dillon, Christine Rutkowski, and Linda Rasmussen, were in the Florida Keys October 22­p;November 4 studying groundwater seepage into Florida Bay as part of a study sponsored by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and a NOAA Sea Grant. The FSU team stayed at the Ranger Station on Key Largo and worked out of the DEP/FIO Keys Marine Laboratory on Long Key.

Techniques for determining ambient mercury species in the environment

Guentzel in Ireland

Ph.D. candidate Jane Guentzel and Research Assistant Laurel Buttermore participated in the first International Field Intercomparison Exercise for measurements of Atmospheric Mercury Species in air and precipitation at a remote marine location. The field studies, scheduled September 7­p;18, 1995, were conducted at the Mace Head field research station located on the west coast of Ireland. The research station is operated by the Atmospheric Physics Research Group at University College, Galway. The exercise was coordinated by the bilateral German -Irish Program (GIP) in Research & Technology, the GKSS Research Center; Geesthacht, and University College, Galway. Twelve research groups from North America and Europe participated in the event. The objective of the field intercomparison was to evaluate and to compare the reliability and capacity of analytical techniques for the determination of ambient mercury species in the environment. The results from the exercise will be presented at the Fourth International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant, August 4­p;8, 1996, Hamburg, Germany.

The Florida Atmospheric Mercury Study (FAMS)

Dr. Bill Landing and Master's candidates Jerome J. Perry Jr. and Scott Sigler spent two weeks in Ft. Lauderdale during August 1995 to collect individual rain samples and 24-hour integrated aerosol and total gaseous mercury samples as part of a special adjunct experiment to the Florida Atmospheric Mercury Study. They were joined later in the month by two research assistants from Dr. Gary Gill's research group at Texas A&M University at Galveston to complete the intensive sampling experiments at two sites in the area. Additional research scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the University of Michigan collected emission samples from waste incinerators and cement kilns in an effort to identify potential sources of atmospheric mercury to south Florida.

The Florida Aquatic Ecosystem Mercury Cycling and Modeling Project (FAEMCMP)

Together with two new Master's candidates, Stephanie Smith (Oceanography) and Alan Rice (Science Education), Dr. Bill Landing led the first two field expeditions to Lake Barco in northeast Florida. Ph.D candidate Reid Corbett served as the lead diver while Masters candidates Scott Sigler and Rice videotaped the lake bottom in anticipation of sediment coring and benthic-chamber experiments.

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new grants

The Minerals Management Service has entered into cooperative agreements with Drs. Ya Hsueh and Wilton Sturges for circulation studies in the Northeastern Gulf of Mexico. Hsueh will receive $1.6 million for a four-year circulation modeling study; Sturges will receive $1.24 million over three years for an observational study of inner-shelf circulation .

Dr. Jeffrey Chanton has been awarded $53,657 by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency to study "Isotopic Signatures of Anthropogenic Sources of CH4: Coal Mining, Landfills, Biomass Burning and Wastewater" for October 1995 through September 1997.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has awarded Dr. Bill Burnett $65,000 for a two-year study of "Partitioning of Actinide Elements in Soils and Sediments." This research began in July 1995 and is intended to assist NIST in developing naturalmatrix standards to be used for assessment of the speciation of radioactive elements in contaminated soils and sediments. It will also be part of the thesis research of Michael Schultz.

Drs. Jeffrey Chanton, Bill Burnett, and Richard Iverson will investigate "Use of Natural and Artificial Tracers to Detect Contaminated Groundwater Flow in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary" with $99,942 funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

NASA has approved funding of $360,000 to Drs. William Dewar and Doron Nof for "Studies of Variable Climate Processes," October 1995 through September 1998.

The Office of Naval Research has granted $121,218 for continued funding of Dr. Ruby Krishnamurti's seven-year study of "Turbulent Convection."

FSU's Center for Ocean-Atmosphere Prediction Studies (COAPS) has received two new grants this year. The first was awarded from NOAA in March 1995 for "The Oceanic Physical Environment for Atlantic Salmon." This is a two-year project for improving the NOAA salmon migration model by generating a more accurate representation of the surface currents. In October 1995, NASA awarded COAPS a grant for "Data Assimilation in Ocean Models." Variational Adjoint Data Assimilation Method will be used in two distinct projects. First, the multi-layer model of the Pacific Ocean from the Naval Research Laboratory for assimilating satellite altimetry information. The second application involves the assimilation of satellite derived SST into a 2.5 -layer Pacific basin model with complete mixed layer physics driven with scatterometer winds. An improved heat-flux data set will be derived.

Dr. Doron Nof has received one of nine planning grants awarded by the FSU Council on Research and Creativity to study "Currents of the Deep Ocean Floor."

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publications

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honors

Congratulations to Professors Allan Clarke and John Winchester, who were among 131 recipients of the Teaching Incentives Program (TIP) awards announced by FSU's Office of the Provost for 1995. TIP award winners receive a $5,000 increase in base salary rate retroactive to 1995­p;6 contracts.

Dr. James J. O'Brien, Distinguished Research Professor, Meteorology and Oceanography, has been elected Chair-Elect of the Section on Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. In 1996 he will serve as Chair-Elect, in 1997 as Chair, and in 1997 as Retired Chair.

Dr. Nancy Marcus is President-Elect of the Southern Association of Marine Laboratories (SAML). Her one-year term as President-Elect begins January 1, 1996, and will be followed by a one-year term as President beginning January 1, 1997.

Ph.D. candidate Mark Verschell received an award for Best Student Presentation for "Effects of Indo-Pacific throughflow on the upper tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans" at TOGA 95, in Melbourne, Australia, in April 1995.

Verschell in Australia

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presentations and service

coming in april

Florida State University's Lunch and Learn Series will feature Dr. Allan Clarke, Tuesday, April 2, 1996. He will speak on "The Child of Change: El Niño and Climate Prediction."

Come learn how our increasing knowledge of El Niño is enabling us to predict climate change more than a year in advance.

11:30 am­p;1:00 PM, Kissimmee Dining Room, Turnbull Center for Professional Development, 555 West Pensacola Street.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Food and beverages are available for purchase, or you may bring your own.

'round and about

Dr. Bill Landing organized and presided over a symposium on "Mercury Deposition and Cycling" at the 1995 American Chemical Society Fall National Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, August 20­p;25, 1995. Among over 30 talks given on a wide range of topics involving the environmental behavior of mercury, were three by graduate students from the department: Dr. David Thistle presented "Do winter storms affect shelf meiofaunal populations?" (co-authored by Dr. George Weatherly, Ph.D. candidate Steve Ertman, and Ann Wonnacott ('83)) at the Benthic Ecology Meeting in New Brunswick, New Jersey, during March 1995. In July 1995, he traveled to the Ninth International Meiofauna Conference, Perpignan, France, where he presented a related paper. Thistle and Dr. Lita Proctor served as members of the Biological Oceanography Panel of the National Science Foundation, May 1995.

At the SEPM Congress on Sedimentary Geology in St. Petersburg, Florida, August 13­p;16, Ph.D. candidate Jaye Young presented "Groundwater Flow Estimates into the NE Gulf of Mexico Using Natural Tracers, Rn222 and CH4" (co-authors Dr. Bill Burnett, Dr. Jeff Chanton, and Ph.D. candidate Glynnis Bugna) and Dr. Bill Burnett and Dr. Craig Glenn (U. Hawaii) presented "Peru Margin Phosphorites and Paleoceanography."

At the 41st Annual Conference on Bioassay, Analytical, and Environmental Radiochemistry in Boston, November 13­p;17, Dr. Bill

Burnett presented "Use of Sequential Extractions to Determine the Speciation of 226Ra in Phosphogypsum" (co-authors Marine Technician Geoff Schaefer, Dr. Carter Hull, and Ph.D. candidate Michael Schultz); Schultz presented "Determination of Geochemical Partioning of Uranium and Transuranium Elements in a Marine Sediment by the Application of Sequential Chemical Extractions" (co-author Dr. Burnett); Ph.D. candidate D. Reide Corbett presented "Uptake of 239Pu and 241Am in Seawater via Diphonix and Actinide CU Resins" (co -authors Schultz, Lab Manager Peter Cable, and Dr. Burnett); and Schultz presented "Determination of Geochemical Partitioning of Uranium and Transuranic Elements in a Marine Sediment by the Application of Sequential Chemical Extractions" (co-author Dr. Burnett).

FSU's Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies ( COAPS) has recently welcomed visiting scientists and students from Russia, Brazil, Japan, France, Chile, Mexico, and Taiwan. COAPS currently is hosting Dr. Kostia Beliaev (Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Moscow), who is collaborating with Drs. James J. O'Brien and Detlev Muller to develop a new Fokker-Plank based Kalman filter application for data assimilation into ocean models. Dr. Bernard Barnier ('86) (Institute de Mechanique de Grenoble, France) visited in October and is collaborating with Drs. O'Brien and David Legler on the use of scatterometer winds in ocean modeling. COAPS hosted a WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment) Data Products Committee meeting April 24­p;27, 1995. Dr. James J. O'Brien gave an invited lecture at the IOC Bruun Memorial Lectures in Paris in June 1995.

Dr. Georges Weatherly presented the paper "Deep Moored Current Measurements in the Brazil Basin," at the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans XXI General Assembly on August 6, 1995, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

On October 19, 1995, Dr. Allan Clarke presented a talk on oceanography to 5th graders at DeSoto Trail Elementary School in Tallahassee.

Dr. Nancy Marcus was an invited participant, panel discussant, and session chair at "Expanding Opportunities in Ocean Sciences," held at Hampton University, September 11­p;12, 1995. Marcus was also an invited participant and session chair at the national workshop "Roles of Marine Laboratories in Implementing the Nation's Emerging Priorities for Research and Monitoring in the Coastal Zone," in Sarasota, Florida, October 24­p;27, 1995.

During his sabbatical, Dr. Doron Nof has made a two-week trip to Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked with Johann Lutjeharms, University of Cape Town, on issues related to eddy generation in the Agulhas Current system.

A national, interactive teleconference on "Current Issues in Scientific Research" was held at FSU and more than 80 other campuses across the United States on November 1, 1995. The conference was organized by Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. FSU participation was organized by FSU Sigma Xi Chapter President John W. Winchester, Professor of Oceanography, and Raymond Bye, Associate Vice President for Research.

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alumni news

We extend our sympathy to Edward "Pat" and Joyce Kelley of Niceville, Florida. Their 32-year-old daughter Shawna passed away in October. (Pat Kelley finished his Ph.D. in 1984 under the direction of Georges Weatherly.)

Chuan Shi ('92)

is now a Research Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center after finishing a two-year postdoctoral appointment at Horn Point Environmental Lab, University of Maryland. His current research focus is seasonal-to-interannual climate anomalies in the Pacific Ocean. He lives in Beltsville, Maryland, with his wife Donghong Li and their two -year-old daughter Victoria and four-year-old son Peter.

Gary Mitchum ('85)

has joined the faculty at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg as an Associate Professor in the Department of Marine Sciences. During his 10-year association with the University of Hawaii, he became director of the UH Sea Level Center. His work running the sea level network involved the operation of 40 to 50 instruments spread over the Indian and Pacific oceans and collecting, processing, and distributing data from over 200 gauges. "Over the past 5 years I have gotten very interested in satellite altimetry," says Gary, "especially in looking at waves and eddies near topography. For the benefit of my non-physical grad school buddies, I'd also like to point that I'm doing a bit of work in fisheries oceanography these days."

Kevin Sherman ('85)

has worked since graduation with the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. Early in his career, he was project manager for a study of possible insect transmission of AIDS in Belle Glade, Florida, the results of which were published in Science (239:193-197) in 1988. Since the possibility of an environmental link to the spread of the virus was debunked, he has conducted research on the environmental impacts of pollution from septic-tank systems on ground water and surface water. After receiving his Oceanography degree, Kevin completed a Masters degree in public health at the University of South Florida in 1989, and he recently has been working on a B.S. degree in civil engineering at the FAMU/FSU College of Engineering. He regularly publishes papers about septic-tank-system-research. He finds the blending of biological oceanography, public health, and engineering concepts useful in his work. In the future, he may pursue an academic position where he can combine the knowledge obtained from these three fields. He and his wife of 16 years, Carol, have an eight-year-old son Ryan.

Robert Avent ('73),

who studied under Robert J. Menzies, starting in 1967, about the same time as the organization of FSU's Department of Oceanography, is an oceanographer with the Minerals Management Service, Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf Office, Environmental Studies Program, in New Orleans. He serves as Contracting Officer's Technical Representative (COTR) for contracted research in the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. South Atlantic. He recommends research programs for this Department of Interior agency, develops criteria and content for research solicitations, evaluates research proposals, and monitors resulting contracts and agreements. He assists in the development of long-range plans for multidisciplinary marine research programs, including those relating to

sensitive continental shelf and slope ecosystems (e.g., hard bottom and chemosynthetic communities), biogeochemical processes, and protected marine species. Prior to holding his present position, he worked with NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, Galveston Laboratory; the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Rockport Marine Laboratory; the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution (then "Foundation") in Fort Pierce, Florida; and two Texas environmental consulting firms. His older son, Sean, is now studying at the University of Washington School of Oceanography in Seattle and Friday Harbor.

degrees conferred

Ming Liu

(Ph.D. 8/95, O'Brien) "Variational Assimilation of Acoustic Topography." Dr. Liu is now working at the NOAA Science Center in Camp Springs, Maryland.

Mark Schrope

(M.S. 8/95, Chanton) "The Effects of Increased Carbon Dioxide and Temperature on Methane Emissions from Rice, Oryza sativa "

Dongliang Yuan

(Ph.D. 8/95, Hsueh) "Toward the Prediction of Surface Temperatures in the Yellow Sea in Winter"

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View from the Bridge

THIS PAST SIX months has been very exciting for the department. We were rated in the top 10 nationally by the National Research Council, ahead of all other programs in Florida and some big names in other states. Everyone was pleased to learn that the excellence that we had known about for some time had been recognized by our colleagues.

The much-anticipated million-dollar contracts from the Mineral Management Service to Phil Hsueh and Tony Sturges were awarded. Together with Georges Weatherly's contract from the Department of Energy, that makes three awards in the department over the million -dollar mark at once, something that I do not believe has ever happened before.

The fall was also exciting because of the search for a new biogeochemist. The biological oceanography and chemical oceanography groups hosted four excellent candidates. They got to hear some very interesting seminars and to talk to some very bright people. There was a little grumbling of the sort "...if I never see Wakulla Springs again, it will be too soon!" because of the heavy social commitment a search imposes on the faculty, but all in all, the search made for an academically rich fall.

Finally, Tony Busalacchi ('82) was honored by the university as one of three "Grads Made Good" during the homecoming celebration. He got to ride in the homecoming parade and make a speech at breakfast before the football game. In that speech, he made point of mentioning people who had been important to his career at FSU. I was pleased to hear Ray Staley's name among them.

David Thistle, Chair

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