Center for Aerosol Science and Engineering (CASE) Distinguished Lecture: Professor Paul Wennberg

Climate Change and the Northern Forests

The northern high latitude land is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth. The increase in temperature is altering the boreal forests – spring comes earlier, and water limitations are increasing resulting in more extreme fire. Advances in remote sensing offers an opportunity to evaluate the changing boreal forests. In this study, we use such observations from multiple sensors to map and diagnose the changes in ecology and in the uptake and release of carbon from the high latitude forests. These data suggest that the next decades will be characterized by rapid changes in the landscape of boreal America and Eurasia.

Paul Wennberg is the R. Stanton Avery Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Science and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in physical chemistry from Harvard in 1994. His research group studies atmospheric composition using laboratory, in situ, and remote sensing tools. He served as the first chair of the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) and was a founding member of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) project. He is a member of U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur Fellow.