“It has been an extraordinary year and an extraordinary summer in the far north,” University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain told National Geographic.

“It has been an extraordinary year and an extraordinary summer in the far north,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Lightning in the Arctic Circle as a whole isn’t that unusual, and portions of northern Alaska and Siberia see some lightning almost every summer. But, said Swain, once...

It’s an indication that things are changing rapidly in the Arctic, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain tells Matt Simon at Wired. He explains that typically convective storm clouds need to rise to a minimum of 15,000 feet to produce a thunderstorm. In lower latitudes, that’s not a problem. Heat and humidity are high enough to...

“It’s this stable layer in the atmosphere that acts essentially as a lid on these convective clouds,” says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain. One of these convective clouds needs to rise at minimum 15,000 feet if it’s going to produce a thunderstorm, and the tropopause makes that harder to do in the Arctic than at...

Although there are several factors that play into why the state’s wildfires have been getting more frequent and devastating, a new study, published this month in the journal Earth’s Future, indicates that climate change is a big factor. The study “documents pretty carefully that there’s a strong relationship between summertime fire and temperature,” said Alex...

UCLA’s Daniel Swain in Vegas news talks about the extreme weather and climate change.  Extreme weather situations often bring about the question of global warming. Climate experts such as Daniel Swain suggests that we have inflicted irrevocable damage to earth’s climate due to our behaviour as he believes “extreme heat events globally have a detectable...

Professor Alex Hall was on a panel about sea level rise hosted by Zócalo Public Square. Here is a highlight from the event: Why are seas rising? Around 45% of sea level rise has occurred because the ice sheets and mountain glaciers are melting, Hall said. Another 45% is happening because the ocean has expanded...

Although photographs of the event’s aftermath testify to tall hail drifts throughout the city, these monoliths were created by urban flash floodingthat sent ice flowing into streets and culverts, not purely through accumulated ice dropped during the storm, as climate scientist Daniel Swain of the University of California Los Angeles explains on Twitter. (Similar occurrences...

UCLA climate scientist, Daniel Swain, in the Washington Post about storms in Honolulu.  The cold front associated with the unusual low-pressure zone triggered thunderstorms and heavy rain. The rainfall was probably increased by warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures surrounding the islands, which were also a contributor to the recent record-warm air temperatures. The warm ocean “raises the...

Climatologist Daniel Swain offers some cautionary thoughts about images of hail from Mexico. Swain is a climate scientist at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). He told me in a message: It was clearly a dramatic and extremely impressive event with major local impacts–but I think the physical characteristics have been fundamentally mischaracterized. I have...

“These enormous #hail drifts are almost certainly the result of an urban flash flood during hail-producing thunderstorm, which washed huge volumes of hail ice from around city into culverts & low-lying areas. Ice floats, so it can go wherever floodwaters do,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain wrote on Twitter. 

California Climate Expedition, a bicycle tour from Oakland to Los Angeles — led by UCLA climate scientist Alex Hall — grants riders the chance to experience climate change impacts in California first-hand. Organized by OnePulse, a group that plans cycling journeys for charitable causes, the ride is raising funds for the UCLA Center for Climate...