Dr. Michael Notaro was awarded a 2014 Editors' Citations for Excellence in Refereeing Award from the American Geophysical Union, specific to the Journal of Climate.

CCR Graduate Student Megan Kirchmeier-Young was awarded the "Best Graduate Student Poster" from the work she presented at the fifth annual AOSS Community Poster Reception. Her project was titled, "Verification of Extremes from Probabilistic Downscaling with an Emphasis on User-Minded Metrics."

Anne Sophie Daloz, part of a group studying Himalayan climate and agriculture, wins the 2015 WARF Discovery Challenge Research Symposium. The team also recently received a CPEP Seed Grant through the Nelson Institute’s Center for Climatic Research, which is awarded annually to support innovative climate research.

CCR Director Jack Williams and PhD student Sam Munoz have a paper just out in PNAS that links the rise and decline of Cahokia (the largest Native American settlement north of Mexico) to shifts in flood regime on the Mississippi River. The paper documents at least 8 large (>10m) floods on the Mississippi over the last 1800 years. Cahokia grew and flourished during a period of regional aridity and few large floods on the Mississippi River (600 to 1200 AD).

Yan Yu successfully completed her PhD preliminary exams for the AOS program. Her research focuses on ocean-land-atmosphere interactions across North Africa.

CCR sponsored two sessions at the April 2015 Nelson Institute Earth Day Conference, "Climate Adaptation in Wisconsin and the Midwest: Implications from the National Climate Assessment" and "Insuring Future Resilience: Risk Management Strategies in a Changing Climate".​ Wisconsin Public Radio interviewed two of the panel members from the former session.

When is a wetland a sink and when is a wetland a source?

That is the question an international team of researchers set out to answer in a new study published online March 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ankur Desai, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of just a few American scientists involved.

Wetlands both absorb carbon dioxide and emit methane, and scientists have long sought how to balance the two in the global greenhouse gas budget — particularly as humans change these natural ecosystems. The study presents real-world data useful to land managers, policymakers, climate scientists and others interested in the potential for wetlands to increase the effects of climate change or as part of the toolkit to combat it.