Coupling Ocean and Atmosphere For Coastal Margin Downscaling

Global climate models are intended to provide plausible simulations of large-scale climate. To be useful for analyzing local impacts, such models usually must be “downscaled.” The coastal margin poses an especially big challenge for downscaling. That’s because downscaling usually focuses on just the atmosphere and terrain, but in a coastal region the interactions among ocean,…

A Quick Approach to Modeling Climate Impacts for Water Resource Managers

Water managers could someday have a quicker way to apply climate scenarios to management decisions at the river basin where they’re needed, new research suggests. In a recent paper in the journal Climatic Change, Julie Vano, who is a postdoctoral fellow at OCCRI, and Dennis Lettenmaier, a CIRC principal investigator at UW, describe a technique they…

Higher Waves Could Mean More Flooding and Erosion

Global and regional sea levels have been increasing because of melting land ice and because the oceans expand as they absorb heat. But it’s not just the average sea level that matters. Damage also is caused by a few hours of the highest waves in a decade. A study by Muyin Wang and colleagues using…

Normal Variability Masks Greenhouse Gas Impact — For Now

Simple physics says that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor. It follows that a warming climate should lead to heavier rain and snowstorms, leading in turn to greater threats to property, transportation and lives. Various studies of past changes in extreme precipitation in the Northwest have reached different conclusions depending on the period…

Julie Vano: Balancing Science and Practice

As a post-doctoral researcher at OCCRI, Julie Vano wants to put the best science on water and climate change in the hands of managers and policy makers, working closely with them to be sure it is usable. The Minnesota native’s career illustrates this mixture of science and outreach. Vano started her professional life with a…