High Meadows Environmental Institute

Impacts of Sea Surface Temperature Warming Pattern Biases on Tropical Cyclone Activity and Hazard

Abstract Most climate models simulate greater warming in the equatorial eastern Pacific than in the west under historical forcing, resulting in a reduced zonal sea surface temperature (SST) gradient and a weakened Walker circulation. This contrasts with observed trends and highli...

Dispersal diversity buffers species vulnerability to local extinction

Abstract Predicting species persistence within ecological communities is a fundamental challenge for both empirical and theoretical ecology. Existing methods span from mechanistic models, whose parameters are difficult to estimate from data, to statistical tools whose context-spe...

Tribal nations’ flood exposure and the U.S. national flood insurance program

Tribal nations experience significant flood impacts, yet participation in the National Flood Insurance Program remains limited. We analyze flood events, claims, and 57 Tribal Hazard Mitigation Plans, and insights from a tribal representative, to identify disparities in insured re...

Discovering how ice crystals grow using neural ODEs and symbolic regression

Depositional ice growth strongly influences the evolution and lifetime of ice-containing clouds on Earth and Mars, yet its physics remain uncertain because the earliest stages of ice-crystal growth cannot be directly observed and are sparsely sampled in laboratory settings. Here,...

Seasonal divergence in compound heatwave–extreme precipitation events

Compound heatwave – extreme precipitation (CHWEP) events pose escalating risks in monsoon-influenced mid-latitude region across the globe, yet, long-term and seasonally-resolved observational evidence remains limited. Here, we quantify the seasonal and long-term changes, and rece...

Different Last Millennium El Niño Southern Oscillation Sea Surface Temperature Patterns Drive Disparate North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Characteristics

Abstract Understanding the relationship between the El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon and North Atlantic tropical cyclone (TC) activity is critical for both seasonal predictions and future projections of TCs. Unfortunately, the satellite observational era (1970‐pres...

Extratropical teleconnections in a multi-model ensemble nudged towards the observed QBO

The Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO), the dominant mode of interannual variability of monthly-mean zonal winds and temperatures in the equatorial stratosphere, has a significant influence on the circulation in other regions of the stratosphere and troposphere in boreal winter. To...

Socio-hydrogeology: The past, present, and future of a people-centred and place-based approach to groundwater science

Groundwater systems are shaped by deeply interwoven physical processes and social dynamics, yet traditional hydrogeological approaches have often treated these domains separately. Over the past decade, socio-hydrogeology has emerged in response, offering an approach that systemat...

Drought dynamics explain once in a century yellow fever virus outbreak in Brazil with implications for climate change

While excess rainfall is associated with mosquito-borne disease because it supports mosquito breeding, drought may also counterintuitively increase disease transmission by altering mosquito and host behavior. This phenomenon is important to understand because climate change is pr...