Forecast: climate conversations with Michael White

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]