Fall 2022
Tuesdays at 3:30 PM
E&MS A340
September 27, 2022
Speaker: Andy Fisher, UC Santa Cruz
Title: Opportunities and Incentives to Enhance California's Groundwater Supplies and Improve Water Quality
Abstract: Managed recharge is increasingly applied to enhance groundwater supplies and also offers opportunities to improve groundwater quality. Key considerations include the nature of water sources, the composition of soils, the potential presence of legacy contaminants, and biogeochemical processes that can reduce contaminant loads during infiltration. This presentation will summarize California's need to augment groundwater resources, and show results from recent field, laboratory, and modeling studies that show how and where improvements can be achieved. This work is being done in the context of a regional program to incentivize resource enhancement through net metering of groundwater pumping.
Host: Tamara Pico
October 4, 2022
Speaker: Kenichi Soga, UC Berkeley
Title: Granular mechanics in geotechnical engineering – critical state soil mechanics
Host: Emily Brodsky
October 11, 2022
Speaker: David Catling, University of Washington
Title: Causes and consequences of the rise of atmospheric oxygen in Earth history
Host: Jim Zachos
October 18, 2022
Speaker: Pedro Monarrez, Stanford
Title: Alternating macroevolutionary regimes: Do mass extinctions alter the rules of evolution?
Host: Matthew Clapham
October 25, 2022
Speaker: Janin Guzman-Morales, UC Santa Barbara
Title: Southern Mexico and Central America Regional Precipitation Variability: Community-informed Science
Abstract: Southern Mexico and Central America (SMCA) is a geographically connected region that shares climate features as well as human livelihoods. The latest compilation of scientific work on the region (IPCC, 2021) is inconclusive regarding heavy precipitation trends during the observational period, both in direction and anthropogenic attribution. In contrast, case studies have reported food security hardship and labor migration due to severe hydroclimate variability and extremes especially in communities that depend on subsistence agriculture. However, communities’ accounts of changing rainfall patterns vary vastly across the SMCA region. This signals that drought and precipitation indexing based on regional averaging may obscure sub-regional differences in the climatological baseline and trending, leading to products or conclusions with little transferability to the fine grid of human experience and that are ultimately of scarce utility to rural agricultural communities. To elucidate SMCA’s precipitation spatio-temporal variability –particularly those most relevant to local communities’ agricultural practices– I am using a combination of climate science methods and social science methods. I have analyzed the sub-regional and sub-seasonal patterns of precipitation, as well as their changes in the observational period, using 70 and 40 years of daily gridded rainfall estimates from two different data set (ERA5 and CHIRPS respectively). Concurrently, I have integrated ethnographic information –collected during an exploratory ethnographic fieldwork during Nov 15 – Nov 30, 2021, in two agricultural-rural communities of eastern El Salvador– to the numerical results examination and interpretation that provides immense insight on precipitation variability and changes that influence the agricultural sowing-harvesting cycle via the traditional, collective, and trans-generational knowledge of climate.
Host: Tamara Pico
November 1, 2022 Special Seminar at 12:30PM
Speaker: Adina Pattan, UCSC
Title: Stable and Radiogenic Sr Isotopes in Barite Clues on Links Between Weathering, Climate and the C Cycle
November 1, 2022
Speaker: Sally Zhang, Johns Hopkins
Title: Response of tropospheric transport to abrupt CO2 increase: dependence on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
Host: Nicole Feldl
November 8, 2022
Speaker: Borja Reguero
Title: TBA
Host: Matthew Clapham
November 15, 2022 - Cancelled
November 22, 2022 - Cancelled
November 29, 2022 - Cancelled
