It’s been a year of loss for me of people I knew, four of whom died too young, and one whom I had the surreal experience to meet twice.

    On May 2, Susan Soper Doddridge, wife of my good friend Bruce, died in a horrendous car crash when a big truck slammed into the back of her car in foggy weather in South Carolina as she was helping her father and mother drive back to Virginia from Florida. Tragically her father died in the crash, too. She was only 53, and left three children, Bruce, and her mother. 26 years ago, when Sherri and I got married, Susan arranged for us to get custom-made wedding rings with peace signs on them. I think of her often when I look at my ring.

    My first wife, Miffi Bedrick, died on August 5 from cancer at the age of 68. We have been divorced for 30 years, and had not been in frequent touch, but she was a very giving person, and it is very sad for her sister Janie and the rest of her family.

     Jón Egill Kristjánsson, age 55, died on August 14 in a hiking accident. We had just organized a wonderful conference together in Oslo on geoengineering in June and he was on his summer holiday. On his way down a mountain, he and his climbing partner used a cord and hooked it to an anchor that had been screwed into a rock, but the anchor gave way, causing Jón Egill to fall 40 m (130 ft). He was a great person and excellent scientist.  He was so alive when I last saw him, and it was hard to believe that he was gone.

     Piers Sellers, my former colleague at the University of Maryland, who then became an astronaut, died on December 23 at the age of 61 of pancreatic cancer. He was a pioneer in the modeling of soil moisture, which is crucial to understanding climate change. He and I became Fellows of the American Meteorological Society at the same ceremony in 1998. But he had higher aspirations, and went on to fly three missions on the space shuttle to the international space station, including six space walks. After stepping down from being an astronaut, he continued to worked hard on global warming science to the end. Here are his obituaries in the New York Times and Washington Post.

    And Fidel Castro died at age 90 on November 25. I had the surreal experience of meeting him twice, in 2010 described here and in 2011 described here. We agreed on trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and I tried to get publicity for those efforts based on his fame. Here is the thank you note from his son, Fidel, for my condolences on the death of his father.

    I took lots of great trips this year.  It started in January with a trip to Oslo for a meeting on our geoengineering project.  I was able to see a Vigeland and Munch joint exhibition at the Munch Museum where Vigeland's sculpture was paired with Munch's paintings, along with Munch's great paintings of Angst and Madonna.  I'm looking forward to the new Munch Museum they are building at the Oslo harbor.  I then flew to Saudia Arabia, to give a talk at the Winter Enrichment Program of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, at the invitation of my friend Gera Stenchikov.  It was a jump of 40 Celsius degrees (70 Fahenheit degrees) from -20°C (~0°F) to +20°C (~70°F) in a few hours. I liked the warmer temperatures better.  I dined on great sushi with Gera and Tanya, admired the view from Gera's office with Joanna Haigh, another of the speakers, appreciated the monument to the founding of KAUST along the beach at sunset, and enjoyed a snorkeling trip that Gera arranged with Jean Paul Vernier, Gera's student Evgeniya Predybaylo.  I flew down to Orlando for a day to learn about how to run our upcoming Gordon Research Conference on Climate Engineering, but all I saw was the lobby of the hotel at the airport.

    In February, I took a quick trip to give a talk at the Univ. of Illinois, and then Sherri and I went to Santa Cruz, California, where I gave an invited talk at a conference on climate change.  We first stayed in Salinas, where John Steinbeck lived, took a hike in Pinnacles National Monument, stopped at a winery, visited Monterey, where we went to the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary (with giant butterflies) in Pacific Grove, walked on  Pebble Beach, with the golf course in the background, and hiked in Point Lobos.  We saw Bob and Sureyya in San Francisco.  The hotel we stayed at in Santa Cruz had a view of one of the best surfing locations in the world with waves that go on for almost a mile.  The UC Santa Cruz campus has a spectacular view.

    In March I visited Mexico City to give some lectures at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and stayed with Dave Adams and his wife Patty.  Then Sherri went with me to England, where I gave invited talks at Imperial College and the Royal Society of Chemistry in London, and at the University of Cambridge.  We stayed at a rental apartment in Mayfair, near Harrods, which had pretty snazzy cars parked everywhere.  We started off with dinner at the Darwin Brasserie in the Sky Garden at the building locally known as the Walkie-Talkie.  It afforded us views of The Shard, the Thames, the sky garden itself, and a wonderful dinner.  We saw Monet paintings in the National Gallery of haystacks and the Japanese bridge in his gardens, which we were to visit later in August in Giverny.  There was also the obligatory left-wing demonstration in Trafalgar Square.  We dropped into the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone.  In Cambridge we took a walking tour, with the spectacular cathedral in Trinity College, the cricket clock, and the monument in the church where George Washington's family worshipped.  They say the stars and stripes on the family crest led to our flag.  We visited the Fitzwilliam Museum, had dinner with Charlie Kennel, Lisa's former boss, and had a real English breakfast.  And of course we saw them punting on the Cam.

    In April I gave invited talks at MIT and Cal Tech.  We then went to Vienna for the European Geosciences Union meeting and on to Potsdam for a meeting on stratospheric sulfur.  In Vienna we had dinner with Gera, Tanya, and our friend Ulli, Tanya posed with matching flowers and Sherri posed with a matching statue.  In Potsdam, we had a typical German meal, saw the old Soviet space mosaics, which even tempted Sherri to do a spacewalk, visited Frederick the Great's Sans Souci (the potatoes on his grave are because he introduced them as human food to Germany), saw the wolves attacking Sherri and guarding the Potsdam Museum, the Glienicke Bridge, and Cecilienhof, where the Postdam Agreement was signed.  We heard performances by the Shanty Choir and an all-women's brass band.  On the dinner cruise, we dined with Juan Carlos Antuña, Anja Schmidt, Ulrike Neimeier, and Mike Mills.

    In May I went to short meetings at NASA in Greenbelt and as part of my Penn State project in State College.  Then we went to New Orleans to visit the grandkids, as Sherri discusses below.  We had a nice visit from Janet Bauer, who had served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines with me 45 years ago, and her husband Maurice.  Long time, no see.  I made several Filipino foods, including chicken adobo, which I must say was quite good.

    In June, I attended a volcano meeting at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, and then we took a fabulous trip to Norway.  After a meetings on geoengineering in Oslo, we drove to the Sognefjord and stayed at the Walaker Hotel in Solvorn, the oldest hotel in Norway.  In Oslo, we visited Vigeland Park and the spectacular Opera House.  We saw Graham Nash do a great show (barefoot) at the Konserthus, and tried to watch an opera in the Opera House, the Marriage of Figaro.  Although it was spectacularly staged, we could not stand the "singing," and left at the first break.  We are just not cultured.  We did enjoy eating pork knuckle, and went for a fabulous conference cruise dinner on the Oslo Fjord, with my postdoc Lili Xia and my student Corey Gabriel, which afforded a nice view of the Opera House.   Our drive to the Walaker included a ferry ride, and this was the view from our room.  The food was spectacular in their beautiful dining room, with dessert on the terrace here and here.  We visited the old (built in 1130) Urnes Stave Church across the fjord, with an old carved interior, with strawberries for sale on the honor system along the road, the Feigumfossen Waterfall and its river, and the Nigardsbreen Glacier.  It was a great experience in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

   In July, I accepted an offer from an IPCC co-author, Jianping Huang (on the left here), to visit Lanzhou University and give some lectures.  Then he arranged for me to visit Dunhuang, on the Silk Road north of Tibet, and I then spent several days in Beijing visiting John Moore at Beijing Normal University.  The map shows these locations.  Lanzhou has huge buildings along the Yellow River, and as seen from my hotel.  One day we drove a couple hours to the Yellow River Stone Forest Scenic Area, where we rode on traditional sheep-skin bladder floats down the river past spectacular cliffs, up a canyon, where they filmed some Jackie Chan "Westerns" on donkey cart, and then by gondola to the top, affording a great view of the river.  The return was by speedboat.  Back in Lanzhou, after touring the University campus, we dined in a private room in a restaurant, at a Mao-themed restaurant, complete with waitresses in Red Army uniforms, at 26-Inch Pizza, and at a beer garden on a barge along the Yellow River, full of young friends.  Lanzhou had a reputation for being polluted, but not while I was there.  They said there had been a concerted effort during the past decade to clean the air.  Prof. Huang's postdoc, Yue Li, accompanied me to Dunhuang, seen here, with camels on the streets.  I stayed in a very nice hotel, along a river with sand dunes in the distance.  We went to the Mogao Caves, which consist of Buddhas in rooms carved into the loess hillside (star in lower right of map).  We then went to this sand dunes amusement park where tourists rode camels, slid down the dunes as workers carried the slides back up, flew in powered hang-gliders, and took selfies.  We also drove out along the Silk Road to a hydrology research station, with a lysimeter and the latest in flux instruments, under the dam (leftmost star on map), and stopped by the largest solar array I've ever seen.  We dined on donkey, lamb, and goat.  The bridge by the hotel was nicely decorated at night. Next, in Beijing, I gave a lecture at the College of Global Change and Earth System Science, attended a geoengineering workshop, said hi to Mao, went to a beer garden with John Moore and his wife, who had their second baby soon thereafter, rode the subway, and was taken to the Peking Opera by Zhiyan Zuo and her husband Dong Xiao, who were to come visit Rutgers for a year.  The opera was spectacular, with clouds, although the sound of Peking Opera is not any better than regular opera.  I also had dinner with my former postdoc Suxia Liu and her husband, who took me to see the spectacular Olympic Park.  But the air in Beijing was so polluted, you could barely see a couple blocks, so I left a couple days early, having one last Peking Duck at the airport.

    In August Danny and Vivi visited us in NJ, as Sherri discusses below.  Then we went for a quick vacation in Paris with our good friend Tony Snyder.  On a very hot day, we had lunch at Le Chalet des Iles in the Bois de Boulogne, and then walked to the spectacular Fondation Louis Vuitton museum, covered in colorful panels by Daniel Buret.  You could see the Eiffel Tower in the distance, and the yellow walkway in the basement.  Our apartment in the 5th (at the top), with its beautiful sunset views, allowed us easy access to the Cluny Museum,, with its erotic tapestries.  We visited the Musee D'Enery with its collections of netsukes, and the Vaux le Vicomte palace, with an inflated horse show at night.  I rented a car in downtown Paris and successfully drove us to Giverny to see the actual hay stacks, Japanese bridge, and weeping willow and pond that Monet painted, his yellow kitchen, stopping to visit our friend Constance Konnold in her little town nearby, delayed by cows on our way back to Paris.  We had lunch with our friends Laure and Paul, had dinner with my colleague Myriam Khodri, and had nice meals at a Spanish restaurant, in an air conditioned Greek restaurant and at the Institut de Monde Arabe, with its view of Paris.

     I took my usual trips to NCAR in October and the Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco in December.  And as usual on both occasions it was great to catch up with old friends and colleagues.  I saw an amazing sight at Newark Airport on the way to San Francisco, and look forward to taking advantage of it next year.  We took the ferry to Sausalito on our first day in San Francisco where we met Dan and Marylou (former nanny for Danny and Vivi) for lunch at one of our favorite restaurants.  What a great place.  At the AGU, some of my current and former grad students and current postdocs took Sherri and me out to a delicious meal.  Governor Jerry Brown gave a very inspiring talk, about how California will continue to lead the fight against global warming.  I got an amazing view of the city from my Editor's dinner at the Fairmont Hotel, while Sherri got a picture of the clouds in front of the moon at the Ferry Building.  Afterwards we visited my sister in Encinidas, who was celebrating the end of her four-year city council term.  We got to visit with her whole family, my nephew Max Robock and his girlfriend Schuyler, my friends Gene and Ellen Sherman in Los Angeles, and Sherri's friend Emily.  We then went to New Orleans for a week to visit Brian, Ginger, and the grandkids.  Sherri and I went to the famous Antoine's Restaurant in the French Quarter, where I had the 4,071,834th Oysters Rockefeller served there, but who's counting?  It was invented there.  Among other things, Sherri had crayfish and I had soft-shell crabs almondine.  All were delicious.  We took Kit, Ginger's mother, out for her birthday, and the kids sort of behaved for pictures.  Danny and Vivi played in their “hidden maze,” and enjoyed Sherri reading them a book.  The kids are well-balanced, and when Vivi wants “up,” she gets it.  On Christmas Day, Vivi did not appreciate her present, but Danny liked his Pokemon cards.  They also ate much of the cookie houses Sherri helped them make.

     We did not see Bob Dylan this year, but saw film clips and a talk by photographer Danny Clinch, with Grammy Museum executive director Bob Santelli moderating, who showed some amazing photos like this one and this one.  We saw some other great music, including Peter Yarrow in February, Graham Nash in June (in Oslo), ELO in August, Joan Baez, Tom Rush and David Bromberg in October, and Arlo Guthrie in November.

    Hermine, a wicked storm, brushed the coast in early September and produced high waves.  But it did not prevent Sherri from taking advantage of the opportunity to have her annual pork roll sandwich.  Later that month, on Sept. 20, there was open-cell Benard convection over us at sunset, producing dramatic patterns.   We enjoyed getting together with our closest friends at the Jersey Shore many times, this one at Kathy and Tim's house.  And we had a great Thanksgiving with my brother Jerry and his wife Stephie, my nephew Zach and his wife Jen.