Tag: Climate

ESSIC/AOSC Professor Raghu Murtugudde recently wrote an article in Tech2 titled “El Niño and La Niña Tinker with Western Disturbances and India’s Winters Too”. In the article, he discusses the unusually cold winter that India has experienced this year.  Though many point to the term “polar vortex” to explain these temperatures, Murtugudde points to El Niño, which affects India’s “Subtropical Westerly Jet” (SWJ), a jet stream that acts as a conduit to western disturbances; …

ESSIC/AOSC Professor Raghu Murtugudde recently published an article in Tech2 titled, “The Trouble with Relying on Trees as Carbon Sink to Do Our Global Warming Bidding”. In the piece, Murtugudde tackles the commonly-held notion that forests are a net ‘sink’ of carbon and a major player in mitigating global warming. He writes that though trees certainly help capture carbon, they also emit a number of emit a number of Volatile Organic Carbon compounds (VOCs).  One VOC, isoprene, can …

ESSIC Visiting Assistant Research Engineer Thomas Wild recently published a paper titled “Balancing Hydropower Development and Ecological Impacts in the Mekong: Tradeoffs for Sambor Mega Dam” in Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management. The paper focuses on navigating energy-ecology-sediment tradeoffs in the Mekong River basin in search of ecologically-focused hydropower alternatives more balanced than current infrastructure and proposed operations.  Contributions of the paper …

ESSIC Research Scientist Bill Lau recently wrote a paper that provided a plausible explanation to the Blanford hypothesis, an 1884 observation of a connection between springtime snow cover on the Tibetan Plateau and the intensity of the summer monsoon season in India. Lau found that the before the monsoons begin, dark aerosols such as dust and soot settle on the Tibetan Plateau’s snowpack and absorb sunlight, causing the snow to melt more quickly.  In years with heavy springtime dust …

ESSIC / CICS-MD assistant research scientist Augustin Vintzileos recently presented at the World Climate Research Programme’s Second International Conference on Subseasonal to Seasonal Prediction (S2S) in Boulder, Colorado. The presentation, titled “Excessive Heat Events and Health: Building Resilience based on Global Scale Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Excessive Heat Outlook Systems”, used data from the S2S database to demonstrate the feasibility of S2S forecasting of excessive heat events, …