Eos,Vol. 81, No. 34, August 22, 2000

SECTION NEWS H Y D R O L O G Y

Editor: Roger C. Bales, Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0011 USA; Tel: +1-520-621-7113; Fax: +1-520-621-1422; Section President, Kenneth W Potter; Section Secretary, Wendy D Graham

Outstanding Student Paper Awards PAGE 384

The Hydrology Section presented six outstand­ing student paper awards at the 2000 AGU Spring Meeting in Washington, DC., last June.

Wade T. Crow presented a poster titled Impacts of Upscaling Soil Moisture During

SGP 97. He received a B.A. in physics from Carleton College in 1995,andaM.S.E. in civil and environmen­tal engineering from Princeton University in 1998. Wade is cur­rently completing his Ph.D. at Princeton. His dissertation work,

supervised by Eric F Wood, focuses on spatial scale issues surrounding both the retrieval of soil moisture imagery by microwave remote sensors and the eventual assimilation of this imagery into hydrologic models.

Ellen M. Douglas presented a paper titled Trends in Flood and Low Flows in the United

States. Ellen earned a B.S. in hydrology in 1991,and a M.S.in civil engineering in 1994, from the University of New Hampshire (UNH). She is currently studying under Richard Vogel of Tufts University as a doc­

toral candidate in water resources engineer­ing. Her doctoral research focuses on data dependence in hydrologic time series and modeling the impacts of climate change on regional hydrology. Ellen also specializes in hydrogeological characterization and model­ing and is a part-time instructor at UNH.

Erich D. Guy presented a paper titled Application of Electromagnetic Techniques for

Organic Contaminant Detection. Erich is now in his third year as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geological Sciences at the Ohio State Uni­versity, working with Jeffrey J. Daniels. In 1996, he received a

B.S. in geological sciences from Mount Union College,and a M.S.in geological sciences from Bowling Green State University in 1998. His current research interests focus on various aspects of surface and borehole radar and seismic methods for environmental, geologic, and geotechnical applications. Additional research efforts have included applications of GIS modeling.

Emad H. Habib presented a poster titled Uncertainty Analysis of Radar-Rainfall

Estimates Using Small-Scale Experi­mental Observations. Emad is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Civil and Environ­mental Engineering at the University of Iowa with Professor Witold Krajewski. He

received a B.S. in civil engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, in 1987, and a M.Sc.in civil engineering from the Polytechnic of Bari, Italy, in 1992. Emads research interests include rainfall measurement and estimation with an emphasis on uncertainty assessment and small-scale variability

Julia E. Morrison presented a poster titled Stochastic Modeling of Flood Peaks Using the

Generalized Extreme Value Distribution. In 1997, Julia received her B.S. in applied physics and mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technolo­gy Russia. She is cur­rently pursuing a

Ph.D. in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton Univer­sity under the direction of James Smith and Rene Carmona. Julias research focuses on many aspects of the stochastic modeling of extreme rainfall and floods, including statistical studies of flood peak observations.

Rene M. Price presented a paper titled Using Tritium, Helium and CFCs to Define Groundwater

Flow Conditions in the Surficial Aquifer System Beneath Ever­glades National Park. Rene is now in her final year as a Ph.D. student at the Rosen-stiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sci­ences. She received a

B.S. in geology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Insti­tute in 1985, and a M.S.in environmental sciences from the University of Virginia in 1988. Renes research interests include chemical trac­ers in hydrogeology stable isotope geochemistry and salt water intrusion.

B I O G E O S C I E N C E S

Editor: (search underway); Acting Section President, Diane McKnight

Outstanding Student Paper Awards

The Biogeosciences Section presented three outstanding student paper awards at the 2000 AGU Spring Meeting in Washington, DC, last June.

Udaysankar S. Nair presented a paper titled Climatic Impact of Lowland Deforesta­tion on Cloud Forests in Costa Rica.

Udaysankar graduat­ed with a B.Tech. in mechanical engineering from the University of Kerala, India in 1988. He obtained his M.S.in meteorology from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 1991.

Udaysankar is completing his Ph.D. through Colorado State University under the direction of Ronald M.Welch and Roger A.Pielke,Sr, and is currently at the National Space Science and Technology Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville. His research interests include mesoscale modeling, the influence of land use on regional climate, the detection of clouds in satellite imagery, and image process­ing.

Lillian Rebecca Pitts presented a poster titled Differing Coastal Development Schemes of Southeastern Virginia and Their Impacts on Seasonal Beach Profiles and Grain Size Distribution. Lillian graduated magna cum laude from Mary Washington College in

Eos,Vol. 81, No. 34, August 22,2000

Fredericksburg, Virginia, last May She completed degree requirements for a B.S in geology with honors.Lillians research interests include nearshore coastal processes and hazards and their relation to

coastal development. She is currently working

as a hydrographer for Dewberry & Davis, LLC-Fairfax, in the Coastal Engineering section for the Federal Emergency Management Agencys National Flood Insurance Program.

Thao Ton-That presented a poster titled Direct 4 0Ar/ 3 9Ar Dating of Latest Pleistocene

Tephra in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1997, Thao received her dipl me in Geneva on 4 0 Ar/ 3 9 Ar dating basalt flows in Patagonia to constrain the timing of Pleistocene glaciations.She is currently completing her Ph.D. on the chronology of latest Pleistocene

marine deposits at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, under the supervi­sion of Brad Singer (now at the Universi­ty of Wisconsin-Madison). Thao s research interests include 4 0Ar/ 3 9Ar geochronology espe­

cially applied to problems in paleoclimate.

BOOK REVIEWS The Earth s Plasmasphere with Contributions from D. L. Carpenter and V. Bassolo

PAGE 389

J. F. LEMAIRE AND K. I. GRINGAUZ Cambridge University Press, New York,

372 pp., ISBN 0-521-43091-7,1998, $90.

The plasmasphere is a region of enduring scientific interest and considerable practical importance. A number of communications, navigation, and military satellites that are becom­ing indispensable to routine human activities are stationed in this region.

To ensure the reliability of these assets, it is important to understand the plasmaspheric environment comprehensively Recently, there has been renewed interest in the plasmasphere as evidenced by a number of imaging missions, such as the NASA/Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE), the US. Department of Defense/Advanced Research & Global Observation Satellite (ARGOS),and the proposed Magnetospheric Imager (MI), whose objectives include imaging the plasmasphere. To fully use the information obtained by remote sensing, we must develop more accurate models of the plasmaspheric structure than are currently available. Hence, an emphasis on plas­maspheric research is particularly timely

Unfortunately, during the decades since the International Geophysical Year (IGY), plasmas­pheric research has witnessed sporadic interest at best, and there are significant gaps in our knowledge of the plasmasphere. New ideas and new perspectives are necessary to advance our understanding of this vital region of near-Earth space. A major impediment for new entrants to this field has been the lack of a readily available, comprehensive description of the current state of the art in the plasmasphere.

The authors of this volume being reviewed have done a commendable job of alleviating this problem.The book is ideal reading for newcomers to the field, as well as for casual but technical readers seeking general knowl­edge about the plasmasphere region.

The book is organized into five chapters and starts with an excellent review of the historic milestones of the fields development,the

Cold War compulsions that affected its devel­opment, and the classified nature of early dis­coveries in the former USSR. It describes other historic asides of significance to the field, which make this chapter a particular pleasure to read. For example, few know that one of the pioneers in the field, Don Carpenter, entered the field by chance, because he was unable to get clearance for a federal government posi­tion that he was seeking.This was a lucky break for the field,since Carpenter would go on to discover the plasmapause (popularly known as the Carpenters knee),and contribute a num­ber of seminal ideas that have shaped the field over the years and will continue to influence it well into the future.

Also, the remarkable and pioneering discover­ies made by the early Soviet satellites are not well known in the west.The authors put forth a good effort to describe the early Soviet experi­ments. Such anecdotes make the subject matter very interesting and engage the reader.

After the popular-level description of the early developments in the plasmasphere, the authors delve more deeply into the discovery of the plasmasphere.They bring the reader up to speed by describing the early experiments using electromagnetic sounding from ground and var­ious radio techniques from satellites.They dis­cuss the most salient parts of these experiments by filtering out the cumbersome details. Howev­er, they include an excellent bibliography to pro­vide the reader with more detailed information. The overview of the plasmasphere morphology as determined from sounding experiments allows the reader to become well aware of the major plasmaspheric features and their geophysical importance.This knowledge is fur­ther reinforced by in-situ measurements from spacecraft. Unique contributions of in-situ meas­urements such as low energy ion composition, pitch angle distribution,and temperature, etc., that cannot be accessed via electromagnetic sounding, are emphasized.

The final two chapters of the book are devoted to making connections between vari­ous observations and developing global mod­

els to tie them coherently into a unified repre­sentation.The authors discuss the combina­tion of different observations to develop a global view of important, observable quanti­ties. This includes density and temperature structures, pitch angle distributions, ion com­position, the shape of the plasmapause, and density irregularities. It also discusses empiri­cal laws for plasma density distribution and electric and magnetic fields that could be deduced from observations.

I found the concluding remarks section in this chapter to be very important. It summa­rizes the gaps in our knowledge and suggests areas in which new experiments will be most useful. It highlights the importance of Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) imaging, along with radio sounding for obtaining global snapshots of the plasmasphere.The authors remark, The sheer size of the plasmasphere system, the elusiveness of the plasmapause formation, and the dynamic and complex nature of the system s behavior suggest the need for imag­ing and radio sounding on a global basis.

The objectives of the imaging experiments mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review are precisely to address this need.

After the exhaustive description of observa­tions in the plasmasphere and an overall phe-nomenological description of the global characteristics, the reader is exposed to rigor­ous theoretical developments in the final chap­ter. A good discussion of various theoretical attempts since early 1960 is provided. Both fluid and kinetic descriptions are elucidated and their theoretical underpinnings are highlighted. The models are then applied to explain obser­vations. Theories for density and temperature morphology, plasmapause formation, and large-scale plasma irregularities are extensively treated.

This book comes on the eve of major new imaging experiments, arguably a crucial point in the development and maturity of plasmas­pheric research. It is expected that with the launch of the IMAGE satellite, new global imag­ing techniques will reveal deeper intrigues of the plasmaspheric dynamics that have so far eluded us. In this exciting period of plasmas­pheric research, this book is very timely and will help motivate and prepare newcomers to tackle the emerging challenges in the field. I am glad to have this book in my collection.

Reviewer

Gurudas Ganguli Plasma Physics Division, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C., USA