Center for Climate Science

It is difficult to predict how bad the rest of this fire season will be based on the number of fires so far, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Our worst fire years aren’t necessarily the years that we’ve had the highest number of fires,” he noted. “All...

The Bay Area, however, might see record heat, according to UCLA climate scientologist Daniel Swain. On Twitter, he says Southern California “should still be quite warm to hot—just not as likely to be record-breaking.”

Daniel Swain (University of California, Los Angeles, and NCAR) has been studying the weather whiplash plaguing California in recent years, as the state lurches between wet years (including 2018-19) and intense drought years akin to those in the early 2010s. “If precipitation is falling in shorter but sharper bursts — as is an emerging trend...

“The weather pattern literally looked like something straight out of January, but it’s May,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA. “This regression back towards winter like conditions is amazing. There was a significant amount of rain near the coast.” It was San Francisco’s 12th wettest May on record, according to the National Weather...

It was Bike to Work Day in LA, but the weather gods had other ideas. A storm came through this morning, which is pretty unusual for Southern California in the middle of May. There may be more rain in the next few days too. Climate researcher and weather blogger Daniel Swain calls it “Mayuary.”

“Some fairly unusual mid-May precipitation expected across a big chunk of the Western U.S., including California!” tweeted Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “Unsettled pattern may continue for 10+ days.”

A futuristic, comprehensive environmental plan for Los Angeles has been drawn up at UCLA. It’s known as the Sustainable L.A. Grand Challenge. It is being hailed as a call to action for groundbreaking intervention that could forge a more sustainable path forward for the great L.A. basin.

Alex Hall, a UCLA climate scientist, talks about his research on emergent constraints within climate modeling.  The first emergent constraint was identified on the snow-albedo feedback by lead author Professor Alex Hall of the University of California in Los Angeles,who said: “we found that the seasonal variation in the amount of snow-cover was closely related...

Alex Hall, a climate scientist at UCLA, spoke with UPI about climate modeling. “Scientists and their models agree, the world is getting warmer and the climate is changing as a result of growing greenhouse gas emissions. But even the best models can’t say exactly what the planet’s climate systems will look like in 2100. ‘We...

Mark Gold, associate vice chancellor for environment and sustainability, spoke with KCRW-FM  about drought conditions in California. “We have a research group here at UCLA, led by Alex Hall, who has been looking at this issue quite intently for the last few years. He has predicted, in his group, that we will have climate whiplash, which...

Research by Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, was quoted in this Inertia article on the end of California’s drought. 

The Great Flood, unleashed 10 feet of rain and snow over California in 43 days at the end of 1861 and the start of 1862. The precipitation formed an inland sea that stretched 300 miles down the Central Valley and as much as 60 miles wide. At least 21 people died, the state declared bankruptcy,...