Congratulations to Miriam Calkins and Stephanie Rushley, awarded the new PCC interdisciplinary fellowships!

These awards are to encourage students to think across disciplinary boundaries and engage in research that is distinct from their dissertation research. Proposed research must have the support of advisors in two different departments.  Two awards were made for 2017/2018.  Miriam Calkins, a graduate student in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS) will be working on “Near future projections of heat-related workers compensation injury claims in Washington State, 2020-2050” and will be advised by Kris Ebi (Global Health), Tania Busch-Isaksen (DEOHS) and Karin Bumbaco (JISAO/State Climatologists Office).   

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Gerard Roe helps connect climate change to individual glacier retreats

Gerard Roe, of the Earth and Space Sciences department, recently published a paper on glacier retreat as evidence of regional climate change. Gerard says, "because of their decades-long response times, we found that glaciers are actually among the purest signals of climate change." This method uses a signal-to-noise ratio that relies on observational records for glacier length, local weather, and the basic size and shape of the glacier, but does not require detailed computer modeling. The technique could be used on any glacier that had enough observations.

Read more at UW News

PCC Graduate Twila Moon talks about mapping Greenland glaciers

Glaciers and ice sheets move in unique and hard to map patterns as observed by satellite images that help map the speed of flowing ice in Greenland, Antarctica and mountain ranges around the world. Twila Moon, a graduate of the PCC, talks about using this evidence to help map out glaciers in Greenland. With the new database, she can study the movements of more than 240 glaciers, which comprise nearly all of the outlets from the ice sheet.

Read more at The University of Bristol

The Program on Climate Change: Moving Forward

by Miriam Bertram, LuAnne Thompson and Greg Quetin LuAnne Thompson opened our PCC-sponsored gathering “Where do we go from here?”  on Thursday, Nov. 17 with a quote by Winston Churchill: “It’s not always enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what is required.” John Kerry shared that call to arms the day before, as part of his remarks at the 22nd Conference of the Parties (COP22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  

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