Successful sustainability research initiatives are grounded in long-standing relationships among scientists, local communities and decision-makers, and widely accessible research data and results, shared CoEnv Dean Lisa Graumlich at last month’s AAAS meeting. She spoke as part of a panel of deans, directors, and department heads who are all interested in bringing science to bear to meet societal issues around sustainability. Read the full article from UW News here. 

Climate models that don’t portray enough clouds in the Southern Ocean have led to a persistent bias elsewhere on the planet: greater rainfall in the tropics. ATMO’s Yen-Ting Hwang and Dargan Frierson discovered this connection; read the full story from UW News here. 

A University of Washington research team has captured color photographs of what could be a previously undocumented species of chambered nautilus, a cephalopod mollusk often classified as a “living fossil,” in the waters off American Samoa in the South Pacific. Peter Ward/UW A Samoan nautilus about 2 miles offshore is seen in this photo from February 2013. At this location, the water was about 1,200 feet deep and the nautilus was at a depth of about 75 feet. 

Archeologists have long assumed the evolutionary development of strong, thick-enameled teeth coincides with a mammals shift to a diet of field grasses. However, a new study in Nature Communications shows some Argentine mammals developed sturdy chompers in response to gritty volcanic dust that appeared in their tropical rainforest habitat. “The assumption about grasslands and the evolution of these teeth was based on animal fossils,” said co-author Caroline Strömberg, from Earth and Space Sciences. 

Snow is hard. This is a fact of meteorological life. A forecaster trying to predict snowfall has to track many variables: the amount of precipitation, the intensity of precipitation, the air temperature, the surface temperature, the atmospheric structure, the timing of everything, the migration of the rain/snow line, and so on. ATMO’s Cliff Mass is mentioned in this discussion of the challenges of snow-casting; Read the full article from the Washington Post.