Many people use tree ring records to see into the past. But redwoods – the iconic trees that are the world’s tallest living things – have so far proven too erratic in their growth patterns to help with reconstructing historic climate.
A University of Washington researcher has developed a way to use the trees as a window into coastal conditions, using oxygen and carbon atoms in the wood to detect fog and rainfall in previous seasons. (more…)
“Cows are happy in parts of Northern California and not in Florida” is a good way to sum up the findings of new research from the University of Washington, said Yoram Bauman, best known as the “stand-up economist.”
Bauman and colleagues found that the decline in milk production due to climate change will vary across the U.S., since there are significant differences in humidity and how much the temperature swings between night and day across the country. For instance, the humidity and hot nights make the Southeast the most unfriendly place in the country for dairy cows.
Their study combined high-resolution climate data and county-level dairy industry data with a method for figuring out how weather affects milk production. The result is a more detailed report than previous studies and includes a county-by-county assessment — that will be available to farmers — of the impact climate change will have on Holstein milk production in the U.S. through 2080. (more…)
Sunday marks the one-year anniversary of the great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, killing more than 16,000 people and causing billions of dollars in damage.
University of Washington scientists say the event has some important lessons for the Pacific Northwest – most notably, not that a similar event can happen here but that it WILL happen here, and that this region is still much less prepared than Japan was a year ago. (more…)
*Ecological changes from lakebed may have led to two different populations of once-related steelhead trout*
A catastrophic landslide 22,500 years ago dammed the upper reaches of northern California’s Eel River, forming a 30-mile-long lake which has since disappeared. It left a living legacy found today in the genes of the region’s steelhead trout.
Using remote-sensing technology known as airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and hand-held global-positioning-systems (GPS) units, scientists recently found evidence for a late Pleistocene, landslide-dammed lake along the river. (more…)
