Research / Theme
Atmospheric processes, hydroclimate extremes, and compound hazards
Illustration
Overview
Storms, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires pose major risks to communities and infrastructure. We study how these events form, how they have changed over the past century, and how they may evolve in a warmer world — knowledge needed to plan for and adapt to them.
Research directions
Representative findings
The strongest winter storms in the western U.S. could bring up to 40% more precipitation at storm centers by mid-century. Understanding these changes is important for assessing future storm risks and improving infrastructure planning.
Machine-learning clustering identifies distinct weather and moisture conditions associated with wildfires in the western U.S., improving seasonal predictions by 10%. Historically, some wildfire types have grown more common while those associated with wetter soils have declined, revealing changing patterns of wildfire risk.
WAC-hydro classifies daily weather into 12 types based on precipitation and temperature, connecting large-scale climate variability to snowpack, runoff, and floods in the Pacific Northwest. The framework identifies weather patterns that elevate flood risk through heavy rainfall, snowmelt, or both.
Warmer coastal ocean temperatures strengthen landfalling atmospheric rivers along the U.S. West Coast, increasing their frequency, intensity, and spatial extent. Numerical experiments show that AR-related extreme precipitation increases by approximately 3% per degree of ocean warming, highlighting the influence of local sea surface temperatures on...
Projects
Evaluating high-resolution simulations of mesoscale convective systems
Our role Lead
Project detailsAdvancing credible and actionable regional climate information
Our role co-Investigator
Partners LBNL · PNNL
Project detailsPublications
