Author: Laura Marshall
It’s become a regular thing to turn on the news during the hot months of the year, and see images of wind-whipped flames devouring a California subdivision or a forested mountainside. In the last decade, fires in the West have burned much larger areas than previously. This phenomenon appears to be linked to the record warmth of the past decade, as well as with forest management choices. (Read More)
Now that we (hopefully) have a better understanding of how climate models make long-term, generalized projections, can we use them to model our monsoon to figure out how it might be different under global climate change? The answer is yes and no, and that has to do with scale. To understand that, we first need to consider how the monsoon works. (Read More)
Figure 1: The upper-level Bermuda High extending to the west in July, when our monsoon begins. The red colors are higher pressures; the center of the Bermuda High is marked by an 'H'. This image is from the National Weather Service.
If you live in the Southwest, no doubt you know a little bit about our weather. It's interesting here. You likely know we have a monsoon during the summer, with awesome thunderstorms and flash floods, and our wettest winters and biggest floods happen when there's an El Niño event. We've also been hearing a lot about global climate change - and there's already a lot of evidence that it's happening here now. One big question is: how will our monsoon change in the future? (Read More)
