Date/Time
Date(s) - Tuesday, October 23, 2018
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Location
Biotech Without Borders

Categories No Categories

A free talk by Dr. Angel G. Munoz

The observed global temperature of our planet is increasing, and this global warming cannot be explained through orbital changes, solar changes, changes in land use, volcano activity, aerosols or other natural causes. It can only be explained via increased concentration of a man-made greenhouse gases. Furthermore, the climate that we observe can be understood as the interaction between the anthropogenic climate change —typically acting as a background signal at centennial scales— and the Earth’s natural climate variability —typically at months-to-decades timescales. Both are important, as natural climate variability can amplify or decrease the impacts of the climate change signal. Hence, it is key that both kind of signals be always considered for decision-making purposes in a wide variety of sectors of interest for society. In this talk we explore these ideas and present tools to help understand those interactions and related uncertainties.

Dr. Ángel G. Muñoz is an Associate Research Scientist in IRI’s climate program; he also leads the Latin American component of the Columbia World Project “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow” (ACToday). Muñoz holds a BS in physics (numerical general relativity), and a PhD in climate sciences (Columbia University, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences). His present research interests are associated with how cross-timescale interferences of climate modes impact predictability and predictive skill of extreme events at subseasonal-to-decadal scales; how these interferences can be used to diagnose misrepresented processes in a hierarchy of atmospheric circulation models; and the development of climate services, especially those regarding food security, vector-borne diseases and lightning.