Additional Topics

Work in this area is concerned with improving our understanding of the processes that govern the climate system—including the interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces, cryosphere, and biosphere—and how they contribute to climate change.

The following list of publications details our work related to understanding climate sensitivity, or the climate system’s response to increased radiative forcing due to greenhouse gas emissions.
 
A key source of uncertainty in global climate model projections is that different global climate models give different answers about climate sensitivity. In recent years, our group’s work has focused on the use of emergent constraints to narrow this uncertainty.

The following list of publications details our work related to understanding future cloud changes and their role in exacerbating or mitigating human-caused warming.

Thee following list of publications details our work related to understanding climate change’s impacts on fire.

Global climate models are complex computing tools that simulate the global climate system, and they are a major foundation of our group’s research. The following list of publications details our work to analyze, evaluate, and constrain global climate model output.

Hybrid downscaling is a methodology that our group developed for regionalizing projections from global climate models. It involves combining dynamical downscaling with statistical downscaling in such a way that maximizes the benefits and minimizes the limitations of each. (See our Downscaling page for more on this topic.) The following list of publications details our work developing, evaluating, and applying hybrid downscaling.

Our group often partners with researchers in fields other than climate science so that we can better understand climate change impacts on natural and human systems. The following list of publications details our interdisciplinary work.

The following list of publications details our work related to understanding the ocean’s role in climate change, and climate change’s impacts on oceans.

The following list of publications details our work related to understanding precipitation changes related to human-caused climate change.

The following list of publications details our work related to understanding climate change’s impacts on runoff of precipitation in watersheds, and their implications for water resources.

The following list of publications details our work related to understanding changes to sea ice, including our efforts to reduce uncertainty in global climate model projections of sea ice albedo feedback.

The following list of publications details our work related to understanding changes to sea ice, including our efforts to reduce uncertainty in global climate model projections of snow albedo feedback.

The following list of publications details our work creating projections of future warming on regional scales, including changes in extreme heat.

Winds are an important aspect of regional climate dynamics. Winds along coasts drive the upwelling of nutrient-rich waters that feed California’s rich coastal ecosystems, and Southern California’s Santa Ana winds are a major factor in the spread of wildfires. The following list of publications details our work related to understanding the processes that drive winds, and how winds will change in the future.