Category: Archive

ESSIC/AOSC Professor Raghu Murtugudde recently published an article titled “Natural Climate Loads The Dice That Turns California’s Droughts, Wildfires Ugly” in Tech2. The article discusses the role of natural variability in climate change vulnerability.  Murtugudde argues that the natural conditions of a location— such as climate, precipitation rates, and distance from the equator— can exacerbate the effects of climate change. “Despite these human factors that exacerbate drought …

The purpose of this and any subsequent posting under this header is to provide guidance to ESSIC employees during the 2019 US Government shutdown. We will update postings as additional information becomes available. While we remain optimistic the shutdown will come to an end before we run out of funds, we are working on contingency plans to minimize disruptions and to enable funding of salaries for as long as possible. GSFC and NOAA facilities are closed to all non-essential workers, …

ESSIC Assistant Research Scientist Chenxi Wang recently published a paper in JGR-Atmosphere titled, “An assessment of the impacts of cloud vertical heterogeneity on global ice cloud data records from passive satellite retrievals”. In the study, the authors give a reasonable explanation  of the large ice water path (IWP) diversity among different global IWP records.  They showed that a large IWP bias may be caused by ignoring ice cloud vertical heterogeneity (CVH).  They also …

Biofuels have the potential to play a critical role in climate change mitigation.  With the ability to be sustained indefinitely, with far less pollution-based fallout as compared to fossil fuel production, biofuels could have a dramatic impact on achieving Paris Agreement targets. However, a new publication whose authors include ESSIC Interim Director and CICS Executive Director Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, articulates that adopting biofuels may not be so simple. The piece, titled “The …