Imtiaz Rangwala Quoted in The Guardian on Recent Heat Wave

Imtiaz Rangwala, the NC CASC’s Climate Science Lead, was quoted in an article in The Guardian, “Record-shattering heat wave bakes Western US, raising drought and fire concerns,” on June 18th.

Join ITEP for a Virtual Climate Change Planning Course for Tribes

Join the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) for the virtual course, "Introduction to Climate Change Adaptation Planning (Western Region)," from August 9th-13th.

Read Phil Higuera's Article on Rocky Mountain Wildfires

NC CASC Consortium Partner and PI Phil Higuera, at the University of Montana, recently wrote an article for The Conversation, “Rocky Mountain forests are burning more now than any time in the past 2,000 years.”

Integrating Climate Change Projections with Breeding Waterfowl Habitat Models

Check out USGS' Land Treatment Exploration Tool

A new USGS tool, the "Land Treatment Exploration Tool" was just released as a part of a NC CASC-affiliated project, "Improving the Success of Post-Fire Adaptive Management Strategies in Sagebrush Steppe."

Read the Latest Tribal Climate Newsletter

Read the June 2021 edition of the Tribal Climate Newsletter.

Three New Projects Fully Open at NC CASC

Three new projects, all with USGS PI's, are now up and running at the NC CASC. Information about each project can be viewed below.

Paper Co-Authored by Imtiaz Rangwala Receives SWCS Award

A paper co-authored by the NC CASC’s Climate Science Lead, Imtiaz Rangwala, was named the 2021 recipient of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation Editor’s Choice Award by the Soil and Water Conservation Society.

Gridded topoclimatic datasets are increasingly used to drive many ecological and hydrological models and assess climate change impacts. The use of such datasets is ubiquitous, but their inherent limitations are largely unknown or overlooked particularly in regard to spatial uncertainty and climate trends. To address these limitations, we present a statistical framework for producing a 30-arcsec (∼800-m) resolution gridded dataset of daily minimum and maximum temperature and related uncertainty from 1948 to 2012 for the conterminous United States. Like other datasets, we use weather station data and elevation-based predictors of temperature, but also implement a unique spatio-temporal interpolation that incorporates remotely sensed 1-km land skin temperature. The framework is able to capture several complex topoclimatic variations, including minimum temperature inversions, and represent spatial uncertainty in interpolated normal temperatures. Overall mean absolute errors for annual normal minimum and maximum temperature are 0.78 and 0.56 °C, respectively. Homogenization of input station data also allows interpolated temperature trends to be more consistent with US Historical Climate Network trends compared to those of existing interpolated topoclimatic datasets. The framework and resulting temperature data can be an invaluable tool for spatially explicit ecological and hydrological modelling and for facilitating better end-user understanding and community-driven improvement of these widely used datasets.