Our researchers are investigating the effects of climate change on heavy precipitation events in the state. Specifically, we're focusing on atmospheric rivers, moisture-laden filaments of air that move across oceans and produce heavy precipitation when they make landfall. Understanding how atmospheric rivers are affected in a changing climate is key to smart water planning in the future.
The California Climate Expedition is an annual bicycle journey led by Center for Climate Science director Alex Hall and our partners at OnePulse. Each journey explores climate change impacts and solutions first-hand and raises funds for a critical area of climate-related research.
The Center for Climate Science is using climate, vegetation, and fire observations and models to answer critical questions for California's future: Under climate change, what will happen to forests? How will fire risk change? How will climate, forest, and fire changes interact with and exacerbate one another — and what can we do to prepare?
In Fall 2018, the UCLA IoES Center for Climate Science kicked off a new five-year project aimed at improving the sustainability of water management operations and planning in Los Angeles County. Our researchers will work closely with key water agencies to ensure that water resources managers take cutting-edge climate science into account.
For more than a decade, the State of California has undertaken periodic scientific assessments with the goal of understanding future climate change impacts on the state. For the first three…
Although our research is primarily focused on regional climate change concerns, we are active in global climate research as well. That's because regional climate research starts with a toolkit developed to operate the global scale. A better understanding of those global tools — their strengths and limitations — helps us do better regional work.
In this project, UCLA and Arizona State University researchers developed a sophisticated and in-depth description of future electricity demand, grid response, and vulnerability due to increased heat events in Southern California Edison territory under current and future climate scenarios. The project's findings enable innovative grid management and operation strategies and identify adaptation guidance.
Using an innovative technique to produce high-resolution future climate projections, our team is answering key questions about the fate of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, a critical natural resource that not only supports an iconic ecosystem but also provides freshwater to millions of Californians.
Within the climate science community, a variety of techniques are used to "downscale" information from global climate models and produce fine-scale projections of future climate, but the relative strengths and weaknesses of these techniques are not well-understood. In this project, we are comparing downscaling techniques and establishing best practices.
The most comprehensive study of climate change in LA to date, the Climate Change in the Los Angeles Region Project was conducted by Center for Climate Science Faculty Director Alex Hall and his research group between 2010 and 2015. Dr. Hall and his team developed a novel method for bringing global climate model projections to high spatial resolution, creating neighborhood-by-neighborhood projections of future climate over the greater Los Angeles region under different scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions.
