Please join us Thursday, May 11, 2023 for our Spring Seminar Series with our speaker: Kevin Anchukaitis. 

Department of Earth System Science 

Seminar Series Spring 2023

12:00-1:30pm 

Thursday, April 27th, 2023 

Hartley Conference Center 

Mountain snowpacks provide essential services for human populations and ecosystems in the western United States.  Warmer temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will continue to alter both the amount and persistence of snow over coming decades, yet future projections are subject to considerable uncertainty due to internal variability in the climate system.  Here we develop a gridded reconstruction of April 1st Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) for the mountains of the western United State since A.D. 1000 based on a network of tree-ring chronologies. Extensive and severe single year snow droughts similar to recent events occurred in the past across the montane western United States, particularly in the late 16th century.  Substantial interannual- and decadal-scale SWE variability is evident across the region, and in many watersheds the cumulative snow deficits over the most recent decades are not yet outside the range of our long reconstruction.  Paleoclimate snowpack data allow us to evaluate the extent to which climate models are able to capture temporal, spatial, and spectral properties of snowpack variability across the western United States and place recent snowpack extremes in a long-term context.
 

Biography

Dr. Kevin Anchukaitis is a Professor of Earth Systems Geography in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona and the Chair of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Global Change. His research focuses on reconstructing past climates and the analysis of forced and unforced variability in the climate system at time scales from seasonal to millennial.  His work also investigates the interactions and feedbacks between climate change, extreme events, and human society in the past, present, and future.  At the University of Arizona, he holds joint appointments in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and the Department of Geosciences.  He received his Ph.D. in 2007 in Geosciences from the University of Arizona and was at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution before returning to Arizona in 2015.

Website

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kanchukaitis/