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Much has been published about developing a cybersecurity curriculum for institutes of higher learning (IHL). Now that a growing number of IHLs globally offer such programs, a need exists on how to guide, maintain, and improve the relevancy of existing curricula. Just as cybersecurity professionals must be hone their skills continually to keep with a constantly shifting threat landscape, cybersecurity programs need to evolve to ensure they continue to produce knowledgeable graduates. In the regard, professional certifications in the cybersecurity industry offer an opportunity for IHLs to maintain a current curriculum. Governing bodies that manage professional certifications are highly motivated to ensure their certifications in assessing a candidate's overall credentials. This paper attempts to fill a void in the literature by exploring the use of professional certifications as helpful input to shaping and maintaining a cybersecurity curriculum. To this end, we offer a literature analysis that shows how changes made to professional certifications are applicable and relevant to maintaining a cybersecurity curriculum. We then provide a case study involving an undergraduate cybersecurity program in a mid-sized university in the United States. Before concluding, we discuss topics such as experiential learning, cybersecurity capstone courses, and the limitations to our approach.

Geostationary satellites have provided routine, high temporal resolution Earth observations since the 1970s. Despite the long period of record, use of these data in climate studies has been limited for numerous reasons, among them that no central archive of geostationary data for all international satellites exists, full temporal and spatial resolution data are voluminous, and diverse calibration and navigation formats encumber the uniform processing needed for multisatellite climate studies. The International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) set the stage for overcoming these issues by archiving a subset of the full-resolution geostationary data at ~10-km resolution at 3-hourly intervals since 1983. Recent efforts at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center to provide convenient access to these data include remapping the data to a standard map projection, recalibrating the data to optimize temporal homogeneity, extending the record of observations back to 1980, and reformatting the data for broad public distribution. The Gridded Satellite (GridSat) dataset includes observations from the visible, infrared window, and infrared water vapor channels. Data are stored in Network Common Data Format (netCDF) using standards that permit a wide variety of tools and libraries to process the data quickly and easily. A novel data layering approach, together with appropriate satellite and file metadata, allows users to access GridSat data at varying levels of complexity based on their needs. The result is a climate data record already in use by the meteorological community. Examples include reanalysis of tropical cyclones, studies of global precipitation, and detection and tracking of the intertropical convergence zone.

In spite of numerous studies on the remote sensing of aerosols from satellites, the magnitude of aerosol climate forcing remains uncertain. However, data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Pathfinder-Atmosphere (PATMOS) dataset--a statistical reduction of more than 19 yr of AVHRR data (1981-2000)--could provide nearly 20 yr of aerosol history. PATMOS data have a daily 110 x 110 [km.sup.2] equal-area grid that contains means and standard deviations of AVHRR observations within each grid cell. This research is a first step toward understanding aerosols over land with PATMOS data. Herein, the aerosol optical depth is retrieved over land at numerous Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) sites around the globe using PATMOS cloud-free reflectances. First, the surface bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) is retrieved using a lookup table created with a radiative transfer model and the Rahman BRDF. Aerosol optical depths are then retrieved using the retrieved BRDF parameters and the PATMOS reflectances assuming a globally constant aerosol model. This method is applied to locations with ground truth measurements, where comparisons show that the best retrievals are made by estimating the surface reflectance using observations grouped by month. Random errors (i.e., correlation coefficients and standard error of estimate) in this case are lower than those where the surface BRDF is allowed year-to-year variations. By grouping the comparison results by land cover type, it was found that less noise is expected over forested regions, with a significant potential for retrieval for 80% of all land surfaces. These results and analyses suggest that the PATMOS data can provide valuable information on aerosols over land.