climate modeling

New insights: global warming drivers in the 20th century and beyond

Posted 24 April 2013 by Liz O'Connell

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists Researchers have combed through the last 2,000 years of climate records. Their assessment affirms that a persistent long-term cooling trend concluded in the late 19th century, reversed by global warming. The study was performed by members of the "2K Network" of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) Past Global Changes (PAGES) project, supported by both the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation. The international effort utilized 'proxy data' to discern temperatures... Read more

0 Comments | Permalink

Alaska bucks the global temperature trend

Posted 20 February 2013 by Liz O'Connell

by Ned Rozell This just in: 2012 was the coldest year of the new century in Fairbanks, and the second coldest here in the last 40 years. Fairbanks isn’t the only chilly place in Alaska. Average temperatures at 19 of 20 long-term National Weather Service stations displayed a cooling trend from 2000 to 2010, according a recent study written up by Gerd Wendler, Blake Moore and Lian Chen of the Alaska Climate Research Center. The rest of the world has... Read more

Posted in Climate Change Watch, General, Modeling Arctic Waters, Weather in Alaska |

0 Comments | Permalink

Dust on the sun’s mirror

Posted 9 January 2013 by Liz O'Connell

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists Imagine yourself on a Colorado mountain slope. Bumblebees buzz happily around dwarf bluebell blossoms, and the spring sun is bright. Except not all is well. The flowers bloom a good seven hundred feet upslope of where they grew five years ago, forcing bees ever higher. Bright petal colors are faded: the flowers are past their prime, plants already flagging. And broad-tailed hummingbirds are only now arriving from their northward migrations. Their customary feast of subalpine... Read more

Posted in AGU Fall Meeting, Arctic's Amazing Birds, Climate Change Watch, Permafrost |

0 Comments | Permalink

Guillemots, and the Edge of the Ice

Posted 20 November 2012 by Liz O'Connell

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists The Bering Sea region hosts over 90% of seabirds breeding in the continental United States. Most of those birds are hardy migrators, breeding on Alaska's coast in the warm season and then departing south, chased away by the cold weather. One group which remains is Guillemots, a type of seabird species which belongs to the auks -- the family includes murres, murrelets, auklets and puffins. Guillemots are special. They don't migrate to far southern latitudes... Read more

Posted in Arctic's Amazing Birds, Climate Change Watch |

0 Comments | Permalink

Making sea ice 300 miles from the ocean

Posted 7 August 2012 by Liz O'Connell

by Ned Rozell Marc Mueller-Stoffels unscrews the top of a glass jar and invites a visitor to smell the powder inside. A sniff evokes the image of kayaking Prince William Sound or walking a beach in Southeast. “We call it ‘Instant Ocean,’” he says, returning the lid to the jar. Mueller-Stoffels, a doctoral student in the Physics Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, uses the white contents of the jar — different types of salts found in seawater all... Read more

Posted in Climate Change Watch, Computational Science |

1 Comments | Permalink

Survey: Abrupt permafrost thaw increases climate threat

Posted 31 July 2012 by Liz O'Connell

by Marie Gilbert As the Arctic warms, greenhouse gases will be released from thawing permafrost faster and at significantly higher levels than previous estimates, according to survey results from 41 international scientists published in the Nov. 30 issue of the journal Nature. Permafrost thaw will release approximately the same amount of carbon as deforestation, authors write. However, the effect of thawing permafrost on climate will be 2.5 times greater because emissions include methane, which is a more powerful greenhouse gas... Read more

Posted in Climate Change Watch, Computational Science, Permafrost |

0 Comments | Permalink

Sunken Treasure under Lake El’gygytgyn

Posted 23 May 2012 by Liz O'Connell

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists Deep under a frozen lake in Siberia, Russia, lies a researcher’s gold: an astounding record of past climates preserved in untouched layers of lake bed sediment. In 2009 an international team of scientists headed to Lake El’gygytgyn (pronounced El’geegitgin). They perched specialized drilling equipment atop the icy lake surface and drilled down. At the bottom of the lake as much as a quarter mile (1,312 feet) of sediment awaited them atop the site of a... Read more

Posted in Climate Change Watch, Permafrost, Where is Lake E'gygytgyn? |

1 Comments | Permalink