“The Grill Sergeants.” Let Them Eat Cake

Face of Defense: Army Chef Spices Up Pentagon Channel By John J. Kruzel American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, – Army Sgt. 1st Class Brad Turner today served hungry Pentagon Channel audiences a new recipe for entertainment during a half-hour cooking show called “The Grill Sergeants.”

“I love cooking gumbo,” Turner said while taking a break from serving cups filled with sausage, seafood and chicken gumbo to hungry workers in a Pentagon hallway. “It is probably the easiest dish to feed a mass of people, and it’s filling, it’s wonderful, and whomever I’m cooking for, I can always adapt it to them.”

Turner is stationed at Fort Lee, Va., and was one of several military “Grill Sergeants” chosen to host the program, which airs Mondays at noon Eastern Time and also will be available on the Pentagon Channel’s Web site, www.pentagonchannel.mil.

The chef, a charismatic showman with nearly 17 years of military experience, said “The Grill Sergeants” differs from other cooking shows in that it caters to a servicemember audience, with much of the dialogue peppered with military overtones.

In his favorite episode, titled “Saving Private Dining,” Turner serenades The Taste Buds’ bassist and his wife as they share a romantic fare that includes shrimp scampi and bananas foster cheesecake, which Turner had just cooked. “They just sat and eyeballed each other and took some time to be together,” the chef said. “It doesn’t get much better than that.”

Turner’s palette is borne of a New Orleans passion for food and, like many natives of the Big Easy, doesn’t eat to live; he lives to eat. The chef said his favorite part of cooking is the unity that emerges through preparing meals.

“I give (the audience) the ability to share themselves with other people,” the host said. “If you bake cookies with your kids, if you take time to cook with your spouse, if you take time to do that, that kind of gesture is irreplaceable.”

Turner hopes “The Grill Sergeants” will encourage families, especially military families distanced by deployments and busy work schedules, to relish moments in the kitchen together, preparing dishes in easy steps outlined in the follow-along cooking show.

“You gotta eat three times a day,” he said. “When your stomach says you’re hungry, why take some time to think, ‘Who have I not spoken to today?’ That’s three times a day that you can show love.”

Each episode of “The Grill Sergeants” will teach audience members how to prepare a single food theme -- cakes, pies or turkey entrées, for example -- while the in-house Army jazz quartet “The Taste Buds,” who also act as official taste testers, play the show’s score. To pique the appetites of Defense Department staffers ahead of the program’s noon debut, the program’s host and producer served the chef’s signature Louisiana-style gumbo in the Pentagon concourse.

Linda Doditch, producer of “The Grill Sergeants,” said the program was conceived as a way to expand the Pentagon Channel’s offering of “lifestyle” programming. “It focuses on healthy eating, nutrition and food safety tips,” she said. “And, of course, we’re incorporating a lot of fun and good recipes and down-home cooking that anybody can make.”

Doditch noted that recipes appearing on the show will be available on the program’s Web site. One of the satisfied Pentagon staffers who enjoyed the gumbo medley said she plans to download the recipe and prepare it for her family.

“The gumbo is delicious; I want seconds,” Defense Department employee Joanne Johnson said. “I certainly am going to try making this.”

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Global Warming: NASA study suggests extreme summer warming in the future VIDEO

A new study by NASA scientists suggests that greenhouse-gas warming may raise average summer temperatures in the eastern United States nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s.

"There is the potential for extremely hot summertime temperatures in the future, especially during summers with less-than-average frequent rainfall," said lead author Barry Lynn of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, New York.

The research found that eastern U.S. summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low-to-mid-80s (degrees Fahrenheit) will most likely soar into the low-to-mid-90s during typical summers by the 2080s. In extreme seasons – when precipitation falls infrequently – July and August daily high temperatures could average between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed nearly 30 years of observational temperature and precipitation data and also used computer model simulations that considered soil, atmospheric, and oceanic conditions and projected changes in greenhouse gases. The simulations were produced using a widely-used weather prediction model coupled to a global model developed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The global model, one of the models used in the recently issued climate report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was utilized in this study to identify future changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns due to the build up of greenhouse gases. This information was then fed into the weather prediction model to forecast summer-to-summer temperature variability in the eastern United States during the 2080s.

The weather model showed that extreme summertime surface temperatures developed when carbon dioxide emissions were assumed to continue to increase about two percent a year, the "business as usual" scenario. These findings are too recent to be included in the latest IPCC report.

The weather prediction model used in this research is advantageous because it assesses details about future climate at a smaller geographic scale than global models, providing reliable simulations not only on the amounts of summer precipitation, but also on its frequency and timing. This is an important capability for predicting summer temperatures because observed daily temperatures are usually higher on rainless days and when precipitation falls less frequently than normal.

Observational climate data also showed that sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean have a significant influence on summer air temperatures in the eastern U.S.

"Relatively cool waters in the eastern Pacific often result in stubborn summer high-pressure systems over the eastern states that block storms, reducing the frequency of precipitation below normal,” noted study co-author Richard Healy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass. "Less frequent storms result in higher surface and atmospheric temperatures that then feedback on the atmospheric circulation to further reduce storm frequency and raise surface temperatures even more."

The global model simulated rainfall too frequently, so that its surface temperatures were not appropriately sensitive to interannual changes in Pacific sea surface temperatures. "Since the weather prediction model simulated the frequency and timing of summer precipitation more reliably than the global model, its daily high temperature predictions for the future are also believed to be more accurate,” added co-author Leonard Druyan, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University.

In comparison, the researchers say that a number of the global models used in previous studies of future climate change predict too frequent precipitation that often falls too early in the day. As a result, they tend to underestimate the amount of future warming by reflecting solar radiation back to space before it can warm the surface and by simulating excessive evaporation from the wet ground.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that has documented the impact of precipitation simulation imperfections on model predictions of surface air temperature. "Using high-resolution weather prediction models, we were able to show how greenhouse gases enhance feedbacks between precipitation, radiation, and atmospheric circulations that will likely lead to extreme temperatures in our not so distant future," said Lynn. ###

Contact: Leslie McCarthy lnolan@giss.nasa.gov 212-678-5507 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

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