Climate & Environment
- INSTAAR’S open access journal “Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research” now offers Arctic Answers, science briefs to help everyone understand how climate change in the Arctic affects the Earth.
- Ben Livneh, CIRES fellow and assistant professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering, is adding a new title to his resume: director of Western Water Assessment.
- With National Science Foundation funding, CU Boulder is joining an interdisciplinary team of researchers aiming to understand the future of imperiled regions of the world.
- NOAA has awarded more than $5 million to the CU Boulder-based Western Water Assessment to advance climate resilience in Intermountain West communities facing low river flows, wildfires, heat, drought and major economic transitions.
- A major research center for sustainable building technology, the Building Energy Smart Technologies (BEST) Center, is a new five-year, multiple-university initiative funded by the National Science Foundation.
- Human-caused emissions of air pollutants fell during last year’s COVID-19 economic slowdowns, improving air quality in some parts of the world, while wildfires and sand and dust storms in 2020 worsened air quality in other places, according to a new report with CIRES co-authors.
- A new report on the global climate confirmed 2020 was among the three warmest years in records dating to the mid-1800s, despite a cooling La Niña influence in the second half of the year. Several CIRES/CU Boulder experts contributed to the report.
- Researchers have been awarded $1.1 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for two projects to help school districts and communities reduce exposure to harmful pollution from wildland fire smoke.
- Hundreds of millions of years' worth of rocks have gone missing from the Grand Canyon's geologic record. Geologists are trying to discover why.
- The new species, mouse- to cat-sized ancestors of today's hoofed animals like cattle and deer, offer scientists a new window into what the American West looked like just after the extinction of the dinosaurs.