Research Focus

Climate variability and change are affecting human and natural systems. Advancing our understanding and predictive capabilities of the pace and magnitude of climate variability and change is critical to inform how to best manage the associated impacts.

We aim to understand the physical mechanisms and dynamics that give rise to climate variability and change through a combination of models, observations, and theory. Beyond that, we strive to connect our research outcomes to impacts on the ground, primarily investigating how climate variability and change affects terrestrial hydroclimate with a focus on water resources.

A new perspective paper provides an up-to-date review of the origin, importance, and predictive limits of internal climate variability and is intended as an accessible entry point for interdisciplinary collaborators and students new to the topic.

Current projects

• Detection and attribution of regional precipitation trends in response to different forcing agents and tropical sea surface temperatures
• Development of a hydrologic metrics evaluation package to understand and reduce hydrologic sensitivity biases in coupled Earth System Models (Funding: NOAA MAPP)
• Estimating the emergence of the anthropogenic warming signal in snow water resource metrics (Funding: NSF)
• An integrative assessment of downscaling methods for infrastructure planning in the face of climate change (Funding: DOD ESTCP)