News & Blog
GCeCS Capstone Opportunity
Posted January 26, 2017 The Northwest Climate Science Center (NW CSC) has an opportunity for a graduate student to develop a GCeCS capstone project that will help them with their ongoing climate science communication efforts. The NW CSC provides climate science support to managers of our region’s natural resources. The UW office is looking for a student interested in helping improve their communication projects while also working on a capstone project.
Read moreIf I were going to blog ….or guidelines for grad students blogging about their capstone communication
Miriam Bertram, January 23, 2017 You’ve completed your capstone project; maybe you gave a series of presentations on “The Road to Paris: Climate Change Science and Policy” or developed a lab for a high school classroom. You’ve evaluated what your audience retained or learned, written your capstone report. Now those Program on Climate Change tyrants want you to write a blog.
Read moreDargan Frierson and Judy Twedt create "The Sound of Earth's Fever"
With NASA releasing the 2016 global temperature data, Dargan Frierson and Judy Twedt made quick work of the high temperatures. Using the global temperature data from 1880-2016, they created a song about the Earth's global temperature. Lower notes mean lower temperature, and higher notes are higher temperature. They chose notes from a musical scale and added drums just for effect. Dargan and Judy state that they "pause in 1977, a critical year for climate" because "scientists were confident at this point that heat-trapping gases from fossil fuels were the main way humans were influencing the climate".
Listen on SoundcloudSarah Myhre talks to Yale Climate Connections about being a young climate scientist
Postdoc Sarah Myhre recently talked to Yale Climate Connections about being a young climate scientist studying climate change and its effect on her moral responsibilities.
Read more at Yale Climate ConnectionsBradley Markle helps relate temperature spikes in the Northern Hemisphere to Southern Ocean winds
A new study, recently published in Nature Geoscience by a group of UW researchers - Bradley Markle, Eric Steig, Cecilia Bitz, and T.J. Fudge - aims to show that "fierce winds circling Antarctica — an important lever on the global climate — shift quickly in response to Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes".
Read more at UW TodayStephen Riser and a team of UW researchers are helping to lead an effort to monitor the Southern Ocean
Stephen Riser, from the School of Oceanography, is a chief scientist of an expedition to better understand the Southern Ocean by dropping robotic floats around Antarctica to monitor carbon dioxide uptake. He and other UW researchers are currently two-thirds of the way through a month long voyage.
Read more at UW TodayUW Applied Physics Lab scientists--Steele, Stern and Schweiger--talk about their approach to sharing climate science in a lunch time conversation with Jerry Lange, Seattle Times.
"For years now, climate scientists have seen explaining their work as a way to help the public make good decisions in response to global warming — without politics."
Seattle Times article by Jerry LangeThe Hille Ris Lambers Lab investigates how climate change alters tree growth
A group of UW researchers in the Hille Ris Lambers Lab recently published a paper on understanding how climate affects tree growth. They conclude that, "competition will mediate the impacts of climate change on individual, and stand, scale growth in important but complex ways".
Read more at NRC Research PressCongratulations to Miriam Calkins and Stephanie Rushley, awarded the new PCC interdisciplinary fellowships!
These awards are to encourage students to think across disciplinary boundaries and engage in research that is distinct from their dissertation research. Proposed research must have the support of advisors in two different departments. Two awards were made for 2017/2018. Miriam Calkins, a graduate student in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS) will be working on “Near future projections of heat-related workers compensation injury claims in Washington State, 2020-2050” and will be advised by Kris Ebi (Global Health), Tania Busch-Isaksen (DEOHS) and Karin Bumbaco (JISAO/State Climatologists Office).
Read moreGerard Roe helps connect climate change to individual glacier retreats
Gerard Roe, of the Earth and Space Sciences department, recently published a paper on glacier retreat as evidence of regional climate change. Gerard says, "because of their decades-long response times, we found that glaciers are actually among the purest signals of climate change." This method uses a signal-to-noise ratio that relies on observational records for glacier length, local weather, and the basic size and shape of the glacier, but does not require detailed computer modeling. The technique could be used on any glacier that had enough observations.
Read more at UW News