Scientific Council

The ICTP's Scientific Council held its 27th meeting on 3-4 June to discuss the Centre's accomplishments during the past year and its plans for the coming year. Director Miguel Virasoro opened the meeting with an hour-long discussion of the changes that have taken place within the Centre since the Council last met. He highlighted the Centre's "Call for Proposals," which he noted was designed to expand the range and scope of ICTP's research activities. He also pointed to the expansion of ICTP's Weather and Climate Group, headed by Filippo Giorgi, who recently joined the Centre's scientific staff, and the imminent launch of the ICTP's Synchrotron Radiation Group, which will be a joint venture with ELETTRA Synchrotron Laboratory in Trieste. Virasoro also cited the physical improvements that have been made--and will continue to be made--to the Centre's guesthouses and offices. Such improvements, Virasoro noted, will allow the Centre to treat its visiting scientists with "the respect and dignity" that Abdus Salam believed would be a key to ICTP's success. Praveen Chaudhari, former Vice President of Science for IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Centre, in Yorktown Heights, New York (USA), presided over his first Council meeting. Chaudhari replaced J. Robert Schrieffer, professor at Florida State University's National Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida (USA). Schrieffer, a Nobel Prize winner, had chaired the Council since 1993.

Winds of Change

Italian-born Filippo Giorgi, who has worked at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, for the past 14 years, has returned to Italy, to become the first director of ICTP's Physics of Weather and Climate Group. At the same time, Fedor Mesinger, a Serbian-born scientist, who is currently a senior researcher with the U.S. National Weather Service, will join the group as a visiting scientist. Their addition will set the stage for an expansion of weather- and climate-related research and training activities at the Centre, a goal which the Scientific Council has urged the ICTP to take. By fall, the group hopes to be fully staffed with the addition of one full-time senior scientist, two support scientists and two postdocs. A major focus of the group will be the development and application of Regional Climate Models (RCMs) used to forecast and analyze climate change at such regional scales as the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa.

Call for Proposals

The ICTP has issued a "Call for Proposals" that has been published in some of the world's most prestigious scientific journals and newsletters, including Physics Today, CERN Courier and Europhysics News. Broadly speaking, the announcement urges scientific institutions and individual scientists to join the Centre in its ongoing efforts to aid scientists in the developing world. More specifically, the announcement invites scientific institutions in the North to become "partners" in the ICTP's Associate Scheme (see "Youth to be Served"). It urges Northern institutions to join the Centre's networks. It encourages researchers from the developed world to teach at ICTP's affiliated centres. And it solicits submissions for the organization of Centre schools, conferences and workshops. The proposals are expected to be submitted over the course of 1998. The partnerships will begin in January 1999. For additional information, please contact proposals@ictp.trieste.it or browse the Centre's WEB page at http://www.ictp.it/proposals/.

Scoop on Soil

ICTP's involvement in soil science research began in 1983, when the Centre hosted its first College on Soil Physics. The most recent session, which took place in April, focused on the critical importance of improving our understanding of soil properties and processes--not only as chemical and geological phenomena but also as matters of physics. Such knowledge should prove particularly important to the developing world as it seeks to meet the challenges of feeding its rapidly growing populations.

Lectures and seminars at the College, attended by more than 50 researchers from 25 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, explored the impacts that erosion, fertilizers, drainage, pesticides and pollution have on soil quality worldwide. Particular attention was paid to the roles played by instrumentation, measurement and modelling.

In addition, the College focused on two geographical areas--the tropics and the Mediterranean--where the quality of the soil is at risk. Human deforestation, which is a recent phenomenon, and intense storms, which have occurred since the beginning of time, are causing serious erosion problems in tropical regions, particularly in the developing world. Excessive irrigation in the Mediterranean, on the other hand, has caused a rapid rise in the salinity levels of soil throughout the region. Unless these trends are reversed, agricultural productivity in both places will decline dramatically.

Soil, which has been studied for some 4000 years, will undoubtedly remain a critical object of scientific inquiry for thousands of years to come. Like the air we breath and the water we drink, there are few other global resource issues that warrant more serious attention.

Tragedy in Campania

The tragic mudslides that struck the Italian region of Campania, on 4 May, killing 161 people, were caused by a small-scale, but unusually intense storm that began two days earlier in Algeria and then swept northeastward across the Mediterranean, picking up punch all along the way. That's the conclusion of Oreste Reale, a scientist with the ICTP Physics of Weather and Climate Group.

"Mediterranean weather systems," he says, "often spawn small-scale, hurricane-like cyclones that can only be detected by the most sophisticated satellite and computer equipment." Reale goes on to note that the state-of-the-art model at the National Center for Environmental Predictions in the United States had forecast dangerous weather conditions for Campania. However, staff members at weather stations and meteorological research centres closer to the site failed to recognize the full extent of the risk.

Reale, one of the first scientists to analyze small-scale, hurricane-like, cyclones in the Mediterranean region, was asked to assess the weather conditions that led to the tragedy by Italy's National Research Council (CNR) and National Council for Hydrologic Disasters (GNDCI). He concluded that unlike a few years ago, "the sophisticated technology now available makes it possible to predict these dangerous events. To take advantage of this progress," he adds, "we must now build the technical facilities and provide the appropriate meteorological training within the region. Such measures will reduce the risk of repeating this tragedy in the future." A full text of the report may be obtained by contacting Reale via e-mail at reale@ictp.trieste.it.

OEA ... by the Numbers

Office of External Activities (OEA) 1997

The ICTP Office of External Activities (OEA), established in 1985, seeks to promote scientific cooperation in the South through its suport of scientific meetings, networks, affiliated centres and visiting scholars. OEA activities are initiated by scientists and scientific institutions in the developing world and carried out at sites located within the region.

A major portion of the funding for OEA Office comes from the Department of Research Cooperation (SAREC) of the Swedish International Development cooperation Agency (SIDA).

For additional information about OEA, please contact the secretariat at oea@ictp.trieste.it.

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