The Nelson Institute’s Center for Climatic Research (CCR) carries a 55-year history of scientific contributions toward understanding the processes and variations of our climate system for the betterment of society.  Shared concerns and passions for the earth are unifying, and the opportunity for research is proceeding at all levels of the university.

Professor Dan Vimont was selected by the Office for the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education as a 2018 Vilas Associate.  The Vilas Associates Competition recognizes new and ongoing research of the highest quality and significance.  Recipients are chosen competitively by the Divisional Research Committees of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education on the basis of a detailed proposal.  Professor Vimont’s proposal aims to better understand the processes that contribute to seasonal hurricane predictability in the Atlantic.

Michael Notaro was interviewed by Wisconsin Public Radio regarding observed and future climate change in Wisconsin, changing weather extremes, and impacts on lakes, agriculture,and forests.

The UW-Madison news website has posted a press release regarding the research of Drs. Michael Notaro and Yan Yu on the topic of observed North African vegetation-rainfall feedbacks, based on their recently-published Nature Communications paper.

Michael Notaro was interviewed by WTTV Chicago regarding research, in collaboration with Steve Vavrus, on climate projections for the Great Lakes region, particularly lake-effect snow.

Michael Notaro presented "Observed and Projected Climate Change and its Implications" at UW-Parkside in November 2017 for the Wisconsin Science Festival.  

A team of researchers at UW-Madison, including former CCR Director Jack Williams, are seeking to better understand, diagnose, and forecast abrupt changes in ecological systems.  A recent symposium (XXLINK) reviewed current efforts to link the theory of regime shifts to multiple real-world ecological systems, ranging from lakes to forests to farms.  This work has been supported by the WARF UW2020 program.

CCR former research assistant Jiaxu Zhang published her PhD work titled with “Asynchronous warming and δ¹⁸O evolution of deep Atlantic water masses during the last deglaciation” on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U. S. A. (PNAS) on October 2, 2017. This work was directed by CCR former professor Zhengyu Liu, in collaboration with scientists from NCAR, WHOI, Oregon State Univ., CU-Boulder, and UW-Madison Dept. of Geoscience. In this work, they implemented an oxygen isotope simulator in an ocean general circulation model and simulated its change in the past 22,000 years, from the Last Glacial Maximum to present day. They found the post-glacial deep ocean temperature rise has been with different rates, with the North Atlantic much earlier than other places. The uneven temperature changes, which has been overlooked by the paleo-climate community, lead to a different interpretation of the sedimentary records, and further to a new post-glacial ocean circulation scenario.