CESD research scientist Christina Patricola weighed in this summer on new research indicating a global slowdown in the rate at which tropical cyclones move over a region. Because the amount of tropical-cyclone-related rainfall that any local area might experience is inversely proportional to this translation speed, these findings could have important implications for regional rainfall…
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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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New Berkeley Lab research published in the journal Nature Communications Thursday explores the impact of a changing climate on Arctic ecosystems with permanently frozen soils. As the Arctic continues to warm at about twice the rate of the rest of the world, scientists expect these frozen soils known as permafrost to thaw, activating microbes capable…
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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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ESMs (Earth system models) are crucial in estimating climate sensitivity, but show large uncertainty in carbon cycle feedbacks. A key step of reducing this uncertainty is to identify the processes that govern carbon-climate and carbon-concentration feedbacks driven by changes in terrestrial carbon stocks. Are these changing carbon stocks driven by changes to inputs, or changes…
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Charlie Koven, scientist in Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, discusses newly published research results in LBNL’s News Center today. As global warming causes soil temperatures to increase, some of the billions of tons of carbon frozen in Arctic permafrost will will be released into the atmosphere, and accelerate climate change. This is a big unknown. Now there’s a…
Read MoreDaniele Rosa and Bill Collins compared precipitation data from Southeastern U.S. rain-gauge measurements with GCMs, finding that GCMs overestimate the impact of medium rainfall while underestimating the impact of no, low, or heavy rain.
Read MoreThis past April, ESD climate scientists Jennifer Holm and Dipankar Dwivedi were part of a group of researchers across Berkeley Lab acting as mentors to 12 junior class members from Albany High School—as part of the school’s Job Shadow Day.
Read MoreLast week, several ESD scientists participated in a live Hangout from above the Arctic Circle in Alaska and at Berkeley Lab.
Read MoreCristina Castanha and others quantified conifer seedling recruitment at Niwot Ridge, CO, to find whether local adaptation influenced forest ecosystem boundaries. Their results suggest that survival through the first few weeks is critical.
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