As the ramifications of climate change broaden, The Why Files set out to learn more about the scientists who study the causes and effects of climate change.

To sample the range of scientific approaches, the website profiled a number of UW-Madison faculty and researchers studying climate change, many of them affiliates of the Nelson Institute.

Congratulations to CCR Scientist Feng He, who was selected to receive the Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship from the NOAA Climate Program Office. The overarching purpose of the NOAA C&GC fellowship program is to help create and train the next generation of leading researchers needed for climate studies. The fellowship will enable Dr. He to collaborate with Prof. Peter Clark of the Oregon State University to investigate the relationship between climate forcing and responses through paleoclimate modeling.

The research of Drs. Michael Notaro, Steve Vavrus, and Yafang Zhong on the mechanism for the observed rapid warming of the Laurentian Great Lakes, as presented at the American Geophysical Union Meeting in December 2014, was summarized by a radio piece from the German Public Radio science program, Forschung Aktuell.

A press release by the Department of the Interior and news story on the UW-Madison Nelson Institute website have announced new grants from the Northeast Climate Science Center, including one by Dr. Michael Notaro to develop projections of snow and winter severity for the Great Lakes region and impacts on wildlife. 

Weatherwise magazine featured an article on Wisconsin weather by our own Ed Hopkins, assistant Wisconsin State Climatologist at UW-Madison and co-author H. Michael Mogil, consulting meteorologist, in its Nov/Dec issue, saying "The Weather and Climate of Wisconsin: It's More Than Frozen Tundra." 

An article in the Syracuse Post-Standard summarized the results of a recently accepted study by Drs. Michael Notaro, Val Bennington, and Steve Vavrus on projected changes in lake-effect snow in the Great Lakes Basin, using dynamical downscaling.

Zhengyu Liu and Feng He are co-authors on a recent paper in Science (Dec. 5th) examining hydrological changes across the North and East Africa during the last deglaciation (about 20,000 to 10,000 years ago). They compared their simulation in state of art climate models with proxy observations and suggest that humid climate started across the Northern and Eastern Africa coherently in spite very different insolation regimes. This coherent change is caused by a systematic climate response across the northern and eastern North Africa in response to an increase of atmospheric CO2 and the meltwater forced response of Atlantic thermohaline circulation. This work has important implications for our prediction of future hydroclimate change across Africa.

Prof. Zhengyu Liu is the lead author of a recent paper in Nature (Nov. 27th) on the modeling and mechanisms of the evolution of El Nino over the past 21000 years. In collaboration with an international research group of experts, Professor Liu found that El Nino has intensified in the last 6000 years. They further found that El Nino changed in response to different forcing mechanisms in different periods. However, the paleoclimatic data currently available are too sparse to confirm other features of the El Nino change. Their work presents a major benchmark of past El Nino evolution study and has important implications to our prediction of El Nino in the future.