Jeff Chambers, faculty scientist within the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab, provided testimony during a recent informational hearing of the California State Assembly focused on the impact of climate change on wildfire risk. Chambers was among a number of subject matter experts called upon to share knowledge relevant to the lawmakers’ consideration…
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This past December the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union got off to a surprising start. Amid rare freeze warnings and snowfall for areas in and around New Orleans, hundreds of the nearly 25,000 conference attendees expecting to escape wintry weather elsewhere were met with flight cancellations and delays. Another surprise came after UC…
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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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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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About 80 EESA scientists are representing Berkeley Lab at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union this week in New Orleans. AGU’s annual fall meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world, with more than 24,000 attendees. For the first time in several years, the meeting is being held away…
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In a paper that appeared online on July 18, 2017 at Weather and Climate Extremes, a team of Berkeley Lab scientists—including EESA's Bill Collins and Christina Patricola—reports that climate change attributed to human activity made a Colorado storm much more severe than would otherwise have occurred.
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As a middle school student in eastern Massachusetts, Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) research scientist Christina Patricola became fascinated with the snowstorms that frequently blanketed her hometown—and quickly recognized her passion for atmospheric science. But despite her early interest, Patricola says she doesn’t know if she would have continued on a scientific career path…
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Soils could release much more CO2 than expected into the atmosphere as the climate warms, according to new research by scientists in EESA's Climate and Ecosystems Sciences Division—Caitlin Hicks Pries, Christina Castanha, Rachel Porras, and Margaret Torn.
Read More“Water-Energy Systems @ Scale” is a big topic at LBNL this year, both for ETA and EESA, which are leading a multi-Area Strategic Initiative. Preliminary ideas within this theme include the development of seasonal and decadal climate prediction capabilities, coupled models of the California managed hydro-climate system including surface and groundwater components, as well as…
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Water and energy are the key resources required for both economic and population growth and yet both are increasingly scarce. The distribution and production of clean water takes large amounts of energy, and the production of energy often requires unexpectedly large amounts of water. Moreover, future energy and water production is expected to be most…
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