News & Blog
Editor’s Highlight for Andrew Pauling on freshwater input from Antarctic ice shelves
Andrew Pauling, a new graduate student working with Cecilia Bitz in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, received an Editor's Highlight for his work on showing the ability of climate models to simulate the positive Antarctic sea ice trends.
Read More at GRLFormer PCC member, Mark Zelinka, tries to clear the cloud-feedback problem
In a recent paper in Nature Climate Change, Mark Zelinka (former PCC member) adds to the discussion of the cloud-feedback problem. Zelinka proposes that the cloud feedback is likely positive rather than negative. Zelinka states that our understanding of the uncertainty "in cloud feedback is a dominant cause of uncertainty in projections of global warming and hence more societal relevant aspects of climate, such as sea-level rise and changes in precipitation, continued progress is necessary".
Read more at Nature Climate ChangeGeoengineering? Could cloud seeding help cool the planet?
A study put out by Dr. Tom Ackerman and Dr. Robert Wood talks about the practicality of geoengineering. They dive into the ethics and touch base on many of the scientific challenges it presents.
Read More at UW NewsEarth likely to warm more than 2 degrees this century says Dr. Frierson
A recent paper published in Nature Climate Change by a group of UW researchers, including Dr. Dargan Frierson, explains just how critical climate action is. The authors use a fully statistical approach based on country-specific variables to forecast CO2 emissions and temperature change to the year 2100. The study is based on the already implemented emission mitigation policies seen today and finds that it is unlikely that the increase in global temperature will stay under the 2°C mark, and that a change between 2°C and 4.9°C globally is more likely.
Read More at UW NewsStephanie Rushley summarizes her interdisciplinary fellowship research "Examination of intraseasonal coral luminescence peaks during the Mid-Holocene"
In this project, Dr. Daehyun Kim (Dept. Atmospheric Sciences) and I partnered with Dr. Julian Sachs (Dept. Oceanography) to examine a hypothesis presented by Lough et al. (2014). The authors examined streamflow and rainfall in the current and mid-Holocene climates using coral luminescence and found that there was an increase in the number of peaks in coral luminescence, hence heavy rain events, per year during the mid-Holocene, indicating an increase in intraseasonal variability of precipitation. In the modern climate, more than one annual peak of luminescence is rare. Lough et al. (2014) hypothesized that the increase in intraseasonal peaks in the mid-Holocene were driven by a stronger Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), which is the dominant source of intraseasonal precipitation variability in the tropics. This fellowship project opened many doors to me that I would have never experienced. Through Dr. Sachs I was introduced to Dr. Janice Lough, from the Australian Institute of Marine Science, who not only shared her monthly coral data from the modern period and mid-Holocene period from three different sites in the Great Barrier Reef, but also took the time to help me understand how to correctly use the data by answering numerous questions. For example, Dr. Lough highlighted some possible errors that can cause unrealistic trends in the coral data that are caused by decay in skeletal density. Dr. Lough has been extremely helpful and I am very grateful to have gotten connected with her during the course of this project. Working with experts in very different areas I found a way to connect my work with the MJO to streamflow and coral proxy which I had never worked with before and find interesting results. One of the most interesting results we found was related to the seasonal cycle of the coral luminescence.
Read the full reportRefuting EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's claim
Qiang Fu (UW Department of Atmospheric Sciences), and Stephen Po-Chedley (recent grad of UW Atmos), are coauthors on the recently published paper refuting EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's claim that, "over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming". The group instead goes back to 1979 and uses satellite data to illustrate the warming over the past 40 years.
Read more at The Washington PostFormer PCC graduate student of ESS says goodbye to glaciers
Twila Moon, a PCC Fellow and former Department of Earth and Space Sciences graduate student recently wrote an article in Science talking about the the global retreat of glaciers. Moon states that "photographs and aerial and satellite images of glaciers show consistent, substantial, and anomalous retreat from the Antarctic Peninsula through Patagonia, Kilimanjaro, and the Himalayas to Greenland and the Arctic. Iconic glaciers—such as many in Glacier National Park, Montana—have already disappeared".
Read more at ScienceSurprising results with the atmosphere from looking at ice cores, bacteria and isotopes!
UW researchers, Lei Geng, Qiang Fu, and Becky Alexander published a study in the journal Nature that shows during large climate swings, oxidants shift in a opposite direction than researchers had expected, which means they need to rethink what controls these chemicals in our air. In their study, they analyzed slices from a Greenland ice core in the UW’s isotope chemistry lab. A new method was created to get a read on changes in the atmospheric oxidants.
Read more at UW NewsKyle Armour on climate sensitivity and global energy budgets
Kyle Armour received much praise for his most recent paper published in Nature. Armour's paper on estimates of climate sensitivity from global energy budget constraints suggest that they are in agreement with values derived from other methods and simulated by global climate models. Climate models do not exaggerate the predicted warming.
Read more at NatureGraduate Student Representative, Greg Quetin, has a new paper in the Journal of Climate
Department of Atmospheric Sciences Graduate Student and PCC Graduate Student Representative, Greg Quetin, recently published a paper in the Journal of Climate on the interaction of vegetation and global climate. The study found that the composition of ecosystems can be shaped by climate in order to take advantage of local environmental conditions. Moreover, the interaction between photosynthesis and temperature can respond to different climatological states. The combination of these two factors determines ecological-climate interaction and the pattern can provide a functional constraint for process-based models, helping to improve predictions of the global-scale response of vegetation to a changing climate.
Read more at the Journal of Climate