Max Moritz regales Mike with some of the many intricacies of modern fire science. The dominant narrative in the Western US might be “long-term fire suppression is leading to severe fire seasons”. While there is some truth here, the individual fire stories are, inevitably, local. Local land use practices, building codes, vegetation stress, and climate change all conspire to make any one explanation … less than convincing. As Max tells it, we need to accept fire as part of our human system, and mo...
Jan 30, 2019•1 hr 6 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_77_peter_bauer.mp3 Numerical weather prediction (NWP) is like excellent coffee in the Bay Area: so common that it is now taken for granted, obscuring the decades of expertise, knowledge, and technique underlying the whole operation. In episode 77 of Forecast, Peter Bauer from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts tells Mike about the massive and decades-long efforts that have made NWP so incredibly useful for modern soci...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 12 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_76_steve_running.mp3 Steve Running from the University of Montana helped to invent the field of large-area, quantitative ecology. Steve was also my MS and PhD advisor – a role that doubtless was the most fulfilling of his career. This August, Steve celebrates his retirement with a reunion of lab members and close colleagues — a reunion that I will unfortunately miss due to an extended overseas trip. In lieu of my corporeal presence, I am...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 10 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_75_yao_tandong.mp3 Yao Tandong tells Mike about realizing his long-held dream: working of the Tibetan Plateau, now as director of the Institute for Tibetan Plateau (ITP) Research (and much else besides!). For Tandong, it all began in 1978 when he was initially exposed to Tibetan glaciology. It cannot have been an easy path. Tandong’s parents were minimally educated, and he was among the first cohort of Chinese students to obtain a wester...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 5 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_74_belinda_medlyn.mp3 The land biosphere takes up a big chunk of atmospheric CO2 emissions. But how, where, and for how long remains an area of, ahem, active research. Or put another way, there’s a lot we STILL don’t know about how increased CO2 will manifest, or not, as an ongoing increase in the terrestrial uptake of carbon. Belinda Medlyn and her colleagues are hot on the topic, with experiments, theoretical analysis, and swaths of mo...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 7 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_73_sergey_gulev.mp3 Sergey Gulev from Moscow State University grew up in the Soviet Union, forged a career as an oceanographer, and then witnessed the dissolution of much of what he and his colleagues had built. Gone were their four ocean-going ships, and the then-Russian science community was not able to capitalize on the modeling and remote sensing that came to dominate much of oceanography in the late 20th century. Sergey moved to Ger...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 6 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_72_carl_wunsch.mp3 Carl Wunsch is at the heart of many of the major advances in modern physical oceanography. The World Ocean Circulation Experiment , satellite altimetry, acoustic tomography, and Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean : all are hard to imagine without Carl’s involvement. In this extended interview, Carl tells Mike about these and many other aspects of his decades of work in the field. Along the way, we hear...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 50 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_71_carolina_vera.mp3 Carolina Vera from the University of Buenos Aires tells Mike about her work on the South American monsoon. Relative to the Indian and Asian Monsoon, the South American Monsoon is understudied — but equally fascinating. The bulk of the land mass is centered near the equator, amplifying the role of tropical ocean-atmosphere interactions. The Andes run north-south, funneling a jet of moisture to Carolina’s back door. In...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 3 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_70_sarah_kang.mp3 Sarah Kang from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology tells Mike about her work to understand the atmospheric and oceanic dynamics that link the extratropics to the tropics. Paleoclimate research has long shown that climate perturbations with strong Northern Hemisphere imprints — like Dansgaard-Oeschger events — are associated with movements of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). But it took a lo...
Dec 26, 2018•56 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_69_jay_famiglietti.mp3 Jay Famiglietti from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tells Mike about taking the plunge into using the GRACE gravity-measuring satellites for hydrology research. Keep in mind, this was at a time when hydrology was viewed as noise in the gravity signal, and that Jay was just starting off as an academic with his first graduate student, Matt Rodell. But making this kind of leap — from surface hydrology in Jay’s case ...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 7 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_68_maisa_rojas.mp3 Maisa Rojas from the University of Chile tells Mike about her work on regional climate modeling, paleoclimate, and the Southern Hemisphere westerlies. The story begins with Maisa’s birth in Chile, but quickly moves on to the family’s dramatic escape from Pinochet’s rebellion and immigration to Germany. Maisa returned to Chile at age 12, and then spent much of her young life traveling and working in the UK, US, and Fran...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 3 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_67_michael_greenstone.mp3 World-famous economist Michael Greenstone tells Mike about his main professional mission: to apply the tools of economics to reduce human suffering. But that wasn’t always the case. No indeed. For many years, including all of college, Michael’s main goal in life was to have a career in the NBA. Happily for economics, Division III basketball at Swarthmore didn’t immediately translate to the desired outcome, and M...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 17 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_65_kaitlin_naughten.mp3 Kaitlin Naughten from the University of New South Wales works on one of the most pressing issues facing modern climate science: interactions between the ocean and the vast ice shelves fringing Antarctica. Existentially, this interaction has the potential to largely determine the rate and amount of sea level rise disgorging from the continent. Will it be 20 cm by 2100? Or 15 m by 2500? The atmosphere is a key playe...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 5 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_64_sonia_seneviratne.mp3 I met Sonia Seneviratne from ETH Zürich at a climate conference way back in 2013. This was not long after she served as a coordinating lead author of the now-famous IPCC SREX report , which lit a spark under the field of climate extremes. Sonia tells me the back story of becoming a CLA, the ongoing challenges of quantifying changes in extremes — droughts in particular, and the need to communicate seemingly obviou...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 5 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_63_jessica_oster.mp3 Speleothems — stalagmites, stalactites, flowstones — are a central tool for reconstructing past hydroclimate variability. But what, really, are they recording? Jessica Oster from Vanderbilt University walks Mike through the long, incredibly long, process of permitting, extracting, transporting, sampling, analyzing, and understanding the isotopic signals encoded in these bedeviling but transporting recorders. Succeedi...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_62_libby_barnes.mp3 Libby Barnes, like essentially no one else on Forecast, wanted to be a professor from age 12. Specifically, a physics professor. And indeed, climate science almost lost Libby to neutrinos. But an instrumentation disaster, and the associated personal mayhem in the research group, made Libby realize that she was geared more for solving a great many problems, not any one particular decade-long quest. Now, Libby is explor...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 1 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_61_dan_lunt.mp3 There’s incessant talk about impostor syndrome among scientists. But paleoclimate modeler Dan Lunt from the University of Bristol actually DOES pretend to be someone he is not. Specifically, Radagast the Brown from Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Samwell Tarly from Martin’s Westeros. Madness? Only if it is mad to spend what must have been a ridiculous amount of time researching and writing papers on The Climate of Middle Earth...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 6 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_60_andrea_dutton.mp3 Andrea Dutton from the University of Florida tells Mike about the many nuances of using corals to reconstruct past sea level. Sounds simple enough: find corals at depth z, date them to year t, and Bob’s your uncle. Yeah … no. Turns out there’s a lot more at play: 3D topography, plasticity in coral’s depth preference, challenging geochemistry, changes in turbidity. The list of complicating factors is long, but Andrea ...
Dec 26, 2018•1 hr 18 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_59_abby_swann.mp3 Abby Swann tells Mike how plants both respond to and affect climate change. Some of this seems obvious: more CO2, more photosynthesis, bigger plants. Maybe, but there’s a lot more to it: nutrient limitations (or lack thereof!), changes in respiration, stomatal conductance downregulation, drought responses, sea ice interactions, atmospheric feedbacks, changes in land cover … the interactions are complex and numerous. Wit...
Dec 20, 2018•1 hr 11 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_58_gcc.mp3 In episode 58 of Forecast, Mike talks with Henri Drake , Jennifer Carman , and Molly Keogh , three of the attendees at the 11th Graduate Climate Conference . The meeting itself is a great chance for grad students working on climate change — broadly defined — to get together with their immediate peers, away from, ahem, pesky senior scientists. The interviews span physical oceanography, wetland restoration, environmental psychol...
Dec 20, 2018•1 hr 3 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_57_eartharxiv.mp3 Tom Narock and Chris Jackson tell Mike about the new EarthArXiv preprint server. The show is a bit of an oddball for Forecast, considering that the show’s usual diet is long-format interviews about a scientist’s life and research. But the launch of EarthArXiv — one of a growing series of preprint servers — could be the spark to light the climate science community’s interest in the use of preprints, long a fixture of fie...
Dec 20, 2018•36 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_56_corinne_le_quere.mp3 Deciphering the global carbon cycle is as fascinating as it is difficult. There are carbon fluxes in and out of the planet, all over the place, and at all time scales. Observational gaps are numerous and gaping. Uncertainties on country level emissions are increasing. Yet the global carbon budget is perhaps THE central bit of knowledge that society must have, if an informed decision on carbon mitigation is ever to...
Dec 20, 2018•36 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_55_joe_mcconnell.mp3 Most everyone you’ve heard on Forecast has a twisty career path. But Joe McConnell took an unusually circuitous route to his current role as a leading ice core scientist. Joe bombed as a dishwasher, thrived as a post-hole digger, started a consulting company as a teenager, considered anthropology and environmental law for his studies, switched gears to signal processing for oil exploration, traveled the world, return...
Dec 20, 2018•1 hr 4 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_54_peter_cox.mp3 In Episode 54 of Forecast, Peter Cox from the University of Exeter gives Mike the inside story about how the “emergent constraints” approach is reshaping our ability to wring every last drop of useful information from climate models. It’s a two step process. First, using climate models, establish a relationship between something you care about in the future to something that is mechanistically related and for which we ha...
Dec 20, 2018•56 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_53_julia_pongratz.mp3 In episode 53 of Forecast, Mike talks with Julia Pongratz from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology about the role of land cover and land use change in the climate system. Julia began working on the topic with an unbelievable challenge: simulating the impacts of LCLUC over the past millennium. Now her interests encompass geoengineering, climate mitigation and model intercomparisons, with a focus on understanding...
Dec 20, 2018•1 hr 1 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_52_m_raphael.mp3 In episode 52 of Forecast, Mike and Marilyn Raphael from the University of California at Los Angeles talk about Antarctic sea ice. Arctic sea ice is, on a relative scale, well understood: observations and models show a massive decline. Antarctic sea ice is weirder. Overall, the extent of Antarctic sea ice is increasing, slightly. But this masks nearby areas with both large increases and decreases. Mike and Marilyn discus...
Dec 20, 2018•54 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_51_jerome_chappellaz.mp3 In episode 51 of Forecast, Jérôme Chappellaz regales Mike with all manner ice core tales. The early days of discovering that methane varies hugely between glacial and interglacial states; profligate consumption of ice in the early days; the intensely competitive yet fundamentally friendly nature of the field; the ever-present need to take scientific risks; documentary film making. Spontaneity, chance and inspirat...
Dec 20, 2018•1 hr 3 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_50_julien_emile_geay.mp3 In episode 50 of Forecast, Julien Emile-Geay from the University of Southern California calmly presents a somewhat radical world view. Love of jazz as a means of selecting a grad school; universities as revolutionary institutions; pursuit of science as a subversive activity. Even more unusual: considering data and models not as separate entities, but as co-equal, and integral, facets of research into paleoclimate...
Dec 20, 2018•1 hr 11 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_49_jessica_tierney.mp3 In this episode of Forecast, Jess tells Mike about the origins of the TEX86 temperature proxy — an index of membrane lipids produced by mesophilic archaea. The origins in the 1980s in extreme ocean environment; discovery of membrane production in a huge range of environments; brute force discovery of the index; the inevitable struggles to understand what it actually represents; an unusually active and sometimes dis...
Dec 20, 2018•1 hr 16 min
https://forecastpod.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/episode_48_kevin_anchukaitis2.mp3 Kevin Anchukaitis from the University of Arizona is probably best known for his work on dendroclimatology, but this is changing quickly. Now, his broader interests in the connections among history, political science, archaeology, statistics, climate modeling, and forward modeling of proxies are increasingly mirrored within the broader field of late Holocene paleoclimate research. Now, it’s possible to bring toge...
Dec 20, 2018•1 hr 5 min
