Da Yang, assistant professor of atmospheric sciences, is gearing up to launch a new research project on the buoyancy effect of water vapor and climate change. Yang received an $810,000 CAREER Award grant from the National Science Foundation, which presents its most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have demonstrated the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.

Warren Winiarski knows how to make beautiful wine and wants to help his beloved Napa Valley continue to do so for years to come. The legendary founder and former winemaker of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars fame is funding an ambitious research project to update and expand the globally recognized Winkler Index and give the industry new tools to cope with climate change.

Beth Forrestel, an assistant professor and plant biologist in the Department of Viticulture and Enology, leads the project to modernize the Winkler Index that growers used for decades to match suitable wine grape varieties with different regions of the state. Even though smoke, wildfires and pandemic-induced restrictions presented some formidable obstacles to field research in 2020, the initial year of the study, Forrestel reports progress by those involved with the work.

Acres of asphalt parking lots, unshaded roads, dense apartment complexes and neighborhoods with few parks have taken their toll on the poor. As climate change accelerates, low-income districts in the Southwestern United States are 4 to 7 degrees hotter in Fahrenheit — on average — than wealthy neighborhoods in the same metro regions, University of California, Davis, researchers have found in a new analysis. 

As climate change takes hold across the Americas, some areas will get wetter, and others will get hotter and drier. A new study of the yellow warbler, a widespread migratory songbird, shows that individuals have the same climatic preferences across their migratory range. The work is published Feb. 17 in Ecology Letters.

With their tough skins, pointy armor and legendary stamina, cacti are made to defend themselves from whatever nature throws at them. 

But large solar energy facilities are one threat that cacti weren’t built to withstand, according to a study by the University of California, Davis. 

California may see a 54 percent increase in rainfall variability by the end of this century, according to new research from the lab of Assistant Professor Da Yang, a 2019 Packard Fellow and atmospheric scientist with the University of California, Davis.

Americans drove drastically less, saved millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases, and, in some states, lost millions in fuel-tax revenue since COVID-19 mitigation efforts took effect in early March. That is according to the latest special report from the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis.

Sometimes, fixing one problem can create another.

Concrete production contributes 8 percent of global greenhouse gases, and demand continues to rise as populations and incomes grow. Yet some commonly discussed strategies to reduce the sector’s global GHG emissions could, under some scenarios, increase local air pollution and related health damages, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.