Anvil clouds are more than the beautiful giant umbrella shape for which they are known. Although they play a large role in Earth’s radiation balance, their effect on global warming is uncertain. New research from atmospheric scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley calls into question a conventional theory that these clouds in…
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This spring, the DOE unveiled a new climate model designed to achieve a number of mission priorities for the agency by not only predicting how climate will change over time–but also determining how those changes might burden the nation’s energy infrastructure. Experts from Berkeley Lab’s Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division co-led efforts to improve the…
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David Romps has been honored by the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest Earth and space science society, with a 2018 Ascent Award. He will receive the award at a ceremony during AGU’s 2018 Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C. Romps, a faculty scientist within EESA and assistant professor within the Department of Earth and Planetary…
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A new Earth System Model (ESM) unveiled today will have weather scale resolution and use advanced computers to simulate aspects of Earth’s variability and decadal changes expected to impact the U.S. energy sector in coming years. After four years of development, the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) will be released to the broader scientific…
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Scientists have directly measured the increasing greenhouse effect of methane at the Earth’s surface for the first time. A research team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) tracked a rise in the warming effect of methane — one of the most important greenhouse gases for the Earth’s atmosphere — over a…
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Building on methods they used to assess the impact of hurricanes such as Katrina, Gustav, and Rita on forests and tree mortality, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have produced a rapid mapping of the disturbance intensity across Puerto Rico’s forests with the help of Google Earth Engine.
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There may be a more direct way to estimate the amount of carbon that exists within soil due to expected changes in climate, according to new research. Scientists use mathematical models that evaluate the carbon content of soils to predict how global change affects the amount of carbon released from soil into the atmosphere as…
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The high temperatures that hit the San Francisco Bay Area during the week of June 18 got a lot of residents thinking about warm weather. And with many cities hitting triple digits, many locals, no doubt, were wondering how to handle extreme heat in the future. By the end of the week, Travis O’Brien, a climate scientist with…
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Over 100 scholars from more than 50 different universities and institutions recently gathered at UC Berkeley for the fourth annual Chinese Environmental Scholars Forum.
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Robinson Negrón-Juárez, Charles Koven, William Riley, Ryan Knox, and Jeff Chambers, researchers in EESA and CESD, published a letter in Environmental Research Letters showing that most earth system models (ESM) overpredict tropical forest biomass in response to increased forest productivity. In contrast, observations show that as tropical forest productivity increases, trees do not continue to store CO2 at…
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