Climate Extremes

Climate extremes pose some of the greatest risks to ecosystems and societies, yet our instrumental records are often too short to capture their full range of variability. My research uses tree-ring data to extend our understanding of climate extremes across western North America.

In high-latitude North America, boreal forests are experiencing rapid change: rising temperatures, shifting precipitation, and increasingly frequent summer droughts. I use quantitative wood anatomy to investigate compound “hot drought” events, the co-occurrence of anomalous heat and moisture stress that increasingly threatens these forests. In Southern California, I focus on precipitation extremes, including the past variability of atmospheric rivers and hydroclimate “whiplash” between wet and dry conditions. Together, these projects aim to place recent extremes in a broader context and to identify the atmospheric dynamics that drive them.