Colloquia for Fall 2025
2025 Outstanding Alum
December 11, 2025
Charlotte Demott
Hosted by Department
I am deeply honored to have been selected as the 2025 CSU Department of Atmospheric Science Distinguished Alumnus. In reflecting upon what might have led to my career being deemed distinguished, I find it hard to separate my own contributions from the support of funding agencies, mentors, and colleagues who challenged me in my thinking and befriended me at meetings. Thank you all. I became…
Fall Grads and Awards Celebration
December 04, 2025
Various Students
Hosted by Department of Atmospheric Science
Fall Grads and Awards Celebration
Biotransformative CDR - A New Approach to CO2 Removal
November 20, 2025
Richard Conan
Hosted by Jim Hurrell
For decades, biological carbon removal has centered on enhancing soil organic matter—a domain where Colorado State University has long been a global leader. Yet despite real advances in understanding carbon cycling, progress toward scalable, durable carbon storage has been constrained by two stubborn limitations: measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) uncertainty, and the inherent…
Energy Imbalance in the Sunlit Ocean Layer
November 12, 2025
Gael Forget
Hosted by Maria Rugenstein
The sunlit ocean layer (SOL, above 200m depth) is where marine life is most abundant and critical climate feedbacks are enacted. Rapid warming of the SOL was underscored recently by unprecedented marine heat waves. Yet, SOL’s heat budget (HB) is not well understood, globally or regionally, as it remains difficult to estimate from observations alone. Here we resolve this issue using an ocean…
A Survey of North American Polar–Subtropical Jet Superposition Events: Development, Impacts, Predictability, and Future Changes
October 30, 2025
Andrew Winters
Hosted by Russ Schumacher
The polar and subtropical jet streams are among the most recognizable structures within the Earth’s atmosphere and are responsible for modulating near-surface weather conditions at midlatitudes. The polar and subtropical jets typically remain separate from one another, but occasionally merge on synoptic time scales to form a “polar–subtropical jet superposition”. A jet superposition…
Towards Management-Scale, Satellite-Based Estimates of Groundwater Depletion
October 23, 2025
Ryan Smith
Hosted by Eric Maloney
Groundwater supplies drinking water for billions of people worldwide, and nearly half of all irrigation water. Many aquifers of the world are being depleted, but traditional methods for estimating storage loss can vary by up to an order of magnitude due to uncertainty in aquifer properties and spatio-temporal sparsity of in-situ measurements such as groundwater levels and withdrawals.…
CIRA Jamboree
October 16, 2025
Steve Miller, Naufal Razin, Erin Sanders, Stephanie Ortland, Josh Reiter and Kim Erickson
Hosted by CIRA
CIRA Jamboree
Global Famine After Nuclear War
October 09, 2025
Alan Robock
Hosted by Jim Hurrell
While nuclear weapons make many of us think of horrific immediate destruction, what we don’t consider as often is the profound climate transformation that could turn fertile regions into barren wastelands. The world as we know it could end any day as a result of a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. The fires produced by attacks on cities and industrial areas would generate…
Enhancing Modeling Capabilities of Land-Atmosphere Interactions to Address Environmental Challenges
October 02, 2025
Cenlin He
Hosted by Dien Wu
Land-atmosphere interactions play a critical role in the Earth system, particularly related to extreme events such as drought and fire, food-water security and agriculture management, as well as subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) prediction. Land models coupled with Earth system models (ESMs) are useful tools to tackle these environmental challenges. Noah-MP is one of the most widely-used land…
“Temporal Memory and Three-Dimensional Structure in Cumulus Convection: Toward Improved MJO Prediction in the Unified Forecast System”
September 25, 2025
Lisa Bengtsson
Hosted by Eric Maloney
With increasing resolution and shorter time steps in global numerical weather prediction, traditional assumptions in cumulus parameterizations, such as steady state and statistical equilibrium, become invalid. Convection can evolve over multiple timesteps and cover a substantial fraction of the grid box, particularly when it becomes organized. In this talk, I will present recent advances in the…
Fires, Fire Emissions, and Fire Impacts on Air Quality
September 18, 2025
Wenfu Tang
Hosted by Dien Wu
Fire is an important component of our Earth system and has long been recognized as one of the major sources of radiatively and chemically active trace gases and aerosols in the atmosphere. In this presentation, I will discuss a few studies related to fire emissions and fire impacts on air quality. (1) Fire impacts on atmospheric composition and chemistry start with fire emissions of trace…
CSU Climate Hub at Spur - A New Collaborative Initiative to Increase the Impact of CSU's Science
September 04, 2025
Veera Mitzner
Hosted by Sonia Kreidenweis and Russ Schumacher
CSU Climate Hub at Spur is a new collaborative initiative to increase the impact of CSU’s science by serving as an accessible entry point for external partners. The Hub offers interdisciplinary climate services that translate CSU research into decision-ready tools for organizations across sectors. In addition, the Hub provides upskilling opportunities through custom training that build…
Downscaled Earth System Model Data for Resilient Energy System Planning
August 28, 2025
Grant Buster
Hosted by Kristen Rasmussen
The second-generation Sup3rCC dataset provides high-resolution meteorological data generated through the downscaling of multiple earth system models (ESMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). This downscaling is performed through application of a generative machine learning approach called Super-Resolution for Renewable Resource Data (sup3r). This dataset builds on…