Talking Climate

As scientists, policymakers, and other environmentally-concerned individuals search for solutions to the changing climate, glaciers are an important topic. With the ability to both study glaciers in their current states, and use geomorphology and numerical modeling to understand the historical placements of glaciers in the past, they hold clues for interpreting the climate. Dr. Leif Anderson has b...

For the world to meet the goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” by mid-century, scientists say removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere will be essential. Dozens of companies have been created and billions of dollars spent already for carbon dioxide removal.  But another greenhouse gas g...

Ricardo Rubio grew up in the borderlands region of southwestern Texas where he came to recognize the challenges and vulnerabilities that communities like his increasingly face because of the compounded effects of water scarcity, political disempowerment, infrastructure scarcity, and climate change. Rubio is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Utah and his researc...

Nicholas Witham, a fifth-year biomedical engineering Ph. D. student at the U, won first place in the Wilkes Student Innovation Prize competition in May 2023 for his proposal titled, " Renewable Energy And Carbon Capture With Thermomotive Biopolymer Textiles ."  His idea proposes a novel renewable energy system that generates power through the daily heating and nightly cooling of the eart...

In continuing our conversations with the winners of the 2023 Wilkes Student Innovation Prize, we spoke with Samantha Eddy and Xiang Huo, whose proposal: “Decarbonize the Diné: A Prefabricated Solar-Driven Communal Solution with Passive Survivability,” won second prize.  It aims to turn Dennehotso, a Navajo chapter in Arizona, into a pilot project for building a self-sustained and eco-friendly livi...

Dr. Kevin Perry has been studying air quality for over 20 years. Perry has monitored plumes from the World Trade Center collapse, smoke from pyrotechnic firework displays, and more recently he has been studying dust blowing off Great Salt Lake. He has deployed equipment to monitor ambient air from the ground, from ships, from the sky, and from high-altitude mountain observatories around the world....

Kai Wilmot, a post-doc in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, studies what smoke plumes do to the atmosphere and how this can inform and improve air quality forecasting. He's currently pursuing development of a five-day smoke forecast for the Western U.S. using trajectory modeling, physics based wildfire plume rise forecasting and satellite based estimation of wi...

Steven Tran and Rabiul Hassan, PhD students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Utah took home the third place prize for the 2023 Wilkes Student Innovation Prize in May. Their proposal to help solve the issue of global climate change is a new organic carbon monitoring system for the soil. 

Ben Santer was an early contributor to the historic 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when a group of leading climate scientists first declared that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”.  Santer was a lead author of a key chapter of that report – chapter 8 – which ⁠ Santer spoke about recently in a talk given at the University of Utah ⁠ ....

In continuation with the ⁠2023 Wilkes Student Innovation Prize⁠ winner interviews, Audri Dara, an undergraduate student in Material Science Engineer and Philosophy at the U, details her proposal on how increased student use of public transportation could help lower carbon emissions at the University of Utah.