On April 1, 2014, a panel of experts discussed how Wisconsin's hunting and fishing will be impacted by climate change at Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in Stevens Point, Wisconsin to an audience of 115 people. The panel included CCR scientist, Dr. Michael Notaro; CCR affiliate, Dr. Ben Zuckerberg; Dr. Matt Mitro of Wisconsin DNR; and George Meyer of Wisconsin Wildlife Federation.

CCR Senior Scientist Steve Vavrus talks about how more extreme Arctic cyclones are a symptom of climate change in an interview with the Nelson Institute.

Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist with the UW Center for Climatic Research, concedes that it’s been a bear of a winter, in a question and answer session with the Madison Cap Times.

Former CCR student Mike Alexander was featured in NOAA Research News about a new web portal that maps climate change effects in oceans. The new web portal that he created is helping NOAA Fisheries Service with its new process to assess how vulnerable fish stocks are to climate change.

The Center for Climatic Research will co-sponsor this year’s UW-Madison Sustainability Forum with the Office of Sustainability on Thursday, February 27 at the H.F. DeLuca Forum in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. This year’s theme will be, “Climate Change in Wisconsin: Where do we go from here?” Discussion topics will include the impacts of climate change on Wisconsin residents and how human actions, adaptation, and innovation can chart a new course forward.

An early member of the Center for Climatic Research, Professor Wayne Wendland passed away on Sunday, 16 February 2014, in Urbana, Illinois. Wayne, a native of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, was one of Reid Bryson’s PhD graduates, receiving his degree in 1971. Working in CCR, he completed his thesis entitled "Dating the Temporal Limits of Climatic Episodes During the Holocene." Earlier, he received his master’s degree in meteorology, with a thesis titled "Aerial survey of Hudson Bay surface temperatures." From 1970 through 1976, he served as assistant professor with joint appointments in the meteorology and geography departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1976, he became a faculty member in the Department of Geography at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, reaching the rank of associate professor by 1979. Wayne became the Illinois State Climatologist at the Illinois State Water Survey at Champaign from 1980 until his retirement in 1996. During his career he had over 75 published professional papers. Earlier, Wayne had served on active duty with the US Air Force from 1956 through 1964, at duty stations in Oklahoma, Nebraska, Newfoundland and Missouri. He is survived by his wife, Betty Willis Wendland of Mahomet, IL, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

CCR Senior Scientist Steve Vavrus was recently interviewed on BBC World Service (6:05-8:48) and Radio New Zealand for his opinions on the spate of extreme weather events around the world. This winter has been unusual not only around Wisconsin and the much of the United States, but internationally as well, with record rainfalls in England, a crippling snowstorm in Japan, and deadly flooding in Burundi and Zimbabwe. Understanding the underlying causes and whether they are related to climate change requires a systematic documentation of these extreme events, rather than the anecdotal evidence often used to make assessments.

Dr. Feng He was interviewed for a news story for LiveScience, related to pre-industrial global temperature increase from early agriculture, published in a recent article in Geophysical Research Letters with Steve Vavrus, John Kutzbach and co-authors.

Dr. Steve Vavrus’ Geophysical Research Letters paper "Extreme Arctic Cyclones in CMIP5 Historical Simulations” was selected as an American Geophysical Union Research Spotlight, appearing in both the on-line edition of Geophysical Research Letters as well as in a column for EOS, the weekly AGU magazine. In his paper, Dr. Vavrus writes, "Winter in the Arctic is not only cold and the dark—it is also storm season…”