Colloquia for Spring 2026

A Community Centered Approach to Air Quality Challenges - Insights From the Field

April 02, 2026

Milena Guajardo

Hosted by Emily Fischer and Melissa Burt

Air quality research often focuses on what we can measure, but meaningful impact requires understanding the full context of people's lives. This presentation shares insights from community-centered work at the intersection of atmospheric science and environmental justice, with a focus on wildfire smoke and oil and gas emissions in disproportionately impacted communities. Drawing from firsthand…

Known Unknowns of Regional Hydroclimate Change Projections

March 26, 2026

Flavio Lehner

Hosted by Maria Rugenstein

While warming targets and carbon mitigation policies are often discussed at global levels, climate change impacts and adaptation unfold at local to regional scales. When zooming into those scales, uncertainties in climate change projections grow and can complicate decision making. Here, we source these uncertainties and provide examples of how they play out in a few case studies focused on the…

The Fingerprint of Evapotranspiration: Quantifying Moisture Source Impacts on Hydroclimate Variability and Drought Risk

January 22, 2026

Yan Jiang

Hosted by Dien Wu

Precipitation regimes over global croplands are sustained by complex moisture transport pathways from land and ocean. Since oceanic and terrestrial evaporation regulate rainfall patterns and seasonality in distinct ways, disturbances in these sources can expose downwind croplands to different hydrological risks. Beyond traditional climate and hydrological modeling, a key question for food…

A Unified Scaling Framework for Drop Size Distributions: Single or Double Moments?

January 15, 2026

GyuWon Lee

Hosted by Michael Bell and Kristen Rasmussen

Drop size distributions (DSDs) are fundamental to advancing our understanding of precipitation microphysics and improving quantitative precipitation estimation and forecasting. Since Marshall and Palmer (1948) parameterized DSDs using a single-parameter exponential function, their explicit representation has become a key component of both remote sensing retrievals and numerical weather…