Members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the professional society for weather, water, and climate sciences and services, have elected Richard (Rick) Spinrad to the position of AMS president-elect for 2026, as well as electing five new council members: Marilyn Averill, Julie Demuth, Jordan Gerth, Maureen McCann, and Aaron Piña.

This study reviews recent advances in ultrasonic cement bond quality evaluation and proposes a unified framework for enhanced signal processing in cased wells, addressing key challenges such as tool eccentricity, lightweight cement discrimination, and weak signal extraction. Validation through synthetic models, laboratory experiments, and field deployments highlights the implications of these developments for machine-learning generalization and real-time well integrity diagnostics.

A new study revealed that giant clam populations in American Sāmoa are far more stable and abundant than previously thought, demonstrating the effectiveness of traditional, community-based resource management. The research found that marine areas managed by local villages consistently support higher clam densities and larger clam sizes compared to federally designated no-take reserves.

Penn geophysicists Hugo Ulloa and Douglas Jerolmack and colleagues have uncovered Earth-sculpting processes that result from the formation of snowball-like aggregates they call “sandballs” that take on two shapes: peanut-shaped structures with liquid cores and stable, donut-shapes—with airy centers—that behave like rigid solids. Their findings provide fundamental insights into erosion and will broaden scientific understandings of landscape change, soil loss, and agriculture.

Researchers typically analyze images taken by geostationary satellites to identify regions of the sky where contrails form, but new research shows adding images taken by low-Earth-orbiting satellites would help identify many more such regions. Pilots could avoid these regions to reduce aviation’s climate impact. 

Understanding the internal structure of asteroids is crucial for deciphering their formation and establishing defenses against potential hazard asteroids (PHAs). Ground-based radar, notably the Goldstone observatory operating in the C-band, plays a crucial role in quickly and precisely determining the orbit, size, shape, and rotation rate of PHAs. Whereas, the limited penetration capabilities of C-band electromagnetic waves hinder the exploration of subsurface information such as porosity and internal structure. A recently constructed interferometric array – DAocheng Radio Telescope (DART), previously known as DSRT for short – designed for low-frequency Sun imaging presents a promising tool for probing asteroid interiors. DART is a circular array of 1 km diameter with 313 element antennas, each with an aperture of 6 m. The nominal receiver band is 150 to 450 MHz. Electromagnetic waves in the band can penetrate asteroids to study the subsurface.