1. Monthly archive

August 2014

Hatshepsut: How Woman Ascended the Throne of Ancient Egypt

American Research Center in Egypt - AZ Chapter free public lecture

Imagining the Past: Historical Fiction in Ancient Egypt

This is a free public lecture that begins at 5:30 pm.

Protecting Ancient Thebes and the Sons of Rameses II

This is a free public lecture that begins at 5 pm.

Monsoon fire-climate meeting

Scrambled or Poached? Modelling and Environmental Signals in Alluvial Systems

Recent numerical and physical modelling has claimed that environmental signals are entirely ‘shredded’ or ‘scrambled’ during fluvial sediment transfer processes, but landform and associated sedimentary records worldwide suggest otherwise. One probable reason for this apparent discrepancy is that many catchments contain depositional ‘niches’ , such as cutoffs, flood basins and identifiable deposits from single  large events (e.g.

Reconstructing Klamath River Flow with Uncertain Instrumental Records: a Mathematical Tale of Passion, Deception, and Desire

Tree-ring based reconstructions of streamflow variability are useful to water resource management. A challenge when developing reconstructions is assessing multiple uncertainties and how these uncertainties impact use in resource management. The skill of tree-ring reconstructions greatly depends on the quality and availability of tree-ring data and the instrument records used for reconstruction training and testing. This presentation will touch on the impact of potential uncertainty in instrumental records with an emphasis on streamflow reconstructions in the Upper Klamath River basin.

Tree-Ring View of “Nameless Oscillation” in California Streamflow

An ongoing severe drought in California highlights the importance of understanding and predicting multi-year swings in moisture availability on the scale of large watersheds.  The 20th and early 21st centuries have seen large oscillations with an average period of about 15 years in annual flows of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, two major sources of water supply for the state of California.  A meeting sponsored by the California Department of Water Resources (CADWR) was held in La Jolla, California, this past May specifically to address hydrologic and climatological aspects of the rh

From cell to continent: introducing our new cambial phenology project

Our aim is to fill important gaps both in the scientific basis for the use of tree rings as natural archives of past climate and in the scientific understanding of the rates and patterns of carbon storage in annual growth layers in relation to seasonal to inter-annual climate variation. These gaps concern the basic natural history of the tissue that forms annual rings in wood, the vascular cambium.

Iron Age population-environment interaction research in Central Asia

Big Data and novel visualization tools to assess biodiversity and the vulnerability of western U. S. forests to climate change

Part of the paralysis of our climate politics is the difficulty in making climate change science tangible and personable. Biodiversity and forests in particular provide numerous services for society, human health, and the economy. Given current and projected climate change, how are our western forests changing and what will our western forests come to look like? Using new collaborative Big Data approaches to integrate, standardize, utilize, and visualize the world's biodiversity and forest data, I will present a new platform to visualize biodiversity and forest data.