Water in a Changing Climate: February-May 2012

Climate change and expanding populations are placing increasing strain on the planet's water resources. Advances in water cycle science and technology can help come up with adaptation and mitigation strategies that can address this challenge. Water applications and management communities are beginning to consider remote sensing data and sophisticated models as tools to provide more accurate assessment of impact on water availability and forecast information. This colloquium series, which will be followed by two focused workshops later on in the year, will address the topic of water availability in a changing climate. The talks will outline the most pressing questions and challenges in water cycle science and water resource management, and will identify new and integrated measurement and modeling techniques that can help address the most critical of these questions. The aim is to integrate water cycle science and water resource management activities at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory into the broader scientific community, and to formulate short- and long-term strategies for developing the needed expertise, technology and resources.

Climate Data Assimilation: June-December 2011

This series of talks touches upon data assimilation in climate science. Data assimilation is the process of combining models and data to come up with better estimates of a system than would be possible with just the model or just the data alone. Such assimilation is used heavily in weather forecasting, but the application of data assimilation in climate science is a relatively new approach. Our Climate Data Assimilation Colloquium Series explores how the synthesis of satellite data and numerical models (through data assimilation techniques) can be used to improve our understanding of the Earth system, the coupling between its components and the planet’s response to man-made climate forcing. The talks listed below cover the atmosphere, aerosols, oceans and ice.