ATOC in the News

Consumers in Boulder are highly susceptible to "local food" marketing, but recent natural disasters should warrant more gratitude this Thanksgiving for remotely-sourced food.

Sho-Air TWENTY20 Cycling announces the signing of Margot Clyne (USA), the reigning 2017 USA National Champion - Hill Climb and a two-time Colorado State Champion. Now a first year PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder, she is working to improve on how the impacts of volcanic eruptions are simulated by climate earth system models. In addition to cycling, her dream is to contribute results to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a career research scientist.

New research published on Monday finds there is so much wind energy potential over oceans that it could theoretically be used to generate “civilization scale power” — assuming, that is, that we are willing to cover enormous stretches of the sea with turbines, and can come up with ways to install and maintain them in often extreme ocean environments.

This peer-reviewed educational video explains human-caused climate change including the greenhouse effect. It is aimed at an undergraduate non-science major level. The video was produced by a team of CIRES scientists in collaboration with CIRES Education and Outreach.

This <5 minute video describes sea ice and land ice processes that are unique to polar regions. Key take-home messages: Melting land ice raises sea level and is irreversible on human timescales. Melting sea ice does not raise sea level and is reversible on human timescales.

This peer-reviewed educational video introduces feedbacks that are important in the Arctic climate system. It is aimed at an undergraduate non-science major level. The video was produced by a team of CIRES scientists in collaboration with CIRES Education and Outreach. Video production was funded by Professor Jennifer Kay's CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (AGS Award 1554659).

The new “initiative-level” selection, Space Weather Technology, Research and Education Center, features collaboration between Jeff Thayer (Aerospace Engineering Sciences), Dan Baker (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP), Cora Randall (Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences) and Nils Halverson (Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences).

"People just grabbed whatever they could carry and went," said atmospheric scientist Josh Wurman, director of the Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR) in Boulder, Colorado. Wurman should know. He and scientist Karen Kosiba, also of CSWR, were running the wrong way, heading for ground zero, where Harvey's fury would roar onshore. They weren't alone. A National Science Foundation (NSF) Doppler-on-Wheels (DOW) was with them.

Dr. John Cassano has posted a couple of plots showing the temperature and solar radiation observed by the ATOC weather stations during the eclipse on Monday. I've also posted a video of the total eclipse as seen from Douglas, WY and a couple of satellite animation perspectives of the eclipse on my weather web page at http://atoc.colorado.edu/~cassano/weather/201708_eclipse/index.html .

Tremendous amounts of soot, lofted into the air from global wildfires following a massive asteroid strike 66 million years ago, would have plunged Earth into darkness for nearly two years, according to a news release from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). This event would have shut down photosynthesis, drastically cooled the planet and contributed to the mass extinction that marked the end of the age of dinosaurs.