UW students win national weather forecasting contest

Faculty lead Lynn McMurdie, center, and some of the students from the winning UW team pose on the roof of the Atmospheric Sciences-Geophysics Building.

The University of Washington has won a national competition in which colleges vie to deliver the most accurate daily forecast for cities across the country. A UW student also developed a machine-learning model that for the first time delivered a more accurate forecast than any human competitor. In results announced this week, the UW team placed first among 36 teams in the annual WxChallenge operated by the University of Oklahoma.

Washington’s state climatologist comments on Puget Sound snowstorm

After many people in the Puget Sound region had dismissed any chance of snowfall in the lowlands this season, the region is now on track for not one, but two, and possibly even more snowstorms this winter. Nick Bond, a University of Washington associate professor of atmospheric sciences who serves as Washington’s official state climatologist, commented Thursday on the upcoming snowstorm – the second to hit the Puget Sound region this week.

Washington’s state climatologist predicts this will be an El Niño year

Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond

Nick Bond is a University of Washington associate professor of atmospheric sciences who studies the link between ocean and atmosphere. He also serves as the state climatologist for Washington. Early reports suggest that the winter of 2018/2019 will be a weak to moderate El Niño year. For the Pacific Northwest, that probably means less snow in the mountains than the average.

Glaciers in Mongolia's Gobi Desert actually shrank during the last ice age

The Gobi-Altai mountain range in western Mongolia is in a very dry region but ice can accumulate on mountaintops, such as Sutai Mountain, the tallest peak in the range. In the picture, friends of Jigjidsurengiin Batbaatar descend this mountain after helping to install a weather station.

The simple story says that during the last ice age, temperatures were colder and ice sheets expanded around the planet. That may hold true for most of Europe and North America, but new research from scientists in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the UW tells a different story in the high-altitude, desert climates of Mongolia. The recent paper in Quaternary Science Reviews is the first to date ancient glaciers in the high mountains of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert.

Ice core shows North American ice sheet’s retreat affected Antarctic weather

Sea ice and icebergs in the Southern Ocean in 2017 off the coast of West Antarctica. The new study looks at the year-to-year variability of storms in this region.

Researchers at the University of Washington were among the co-authors of a new study that uses ice core data to see how Earth’s climate behaved at the end of the last ice age, when the Laurentide Ice Sheet covering much of North America retreated about 16,000 years ago. The study led by the University of Colorado Boulder is published online this week and will be in the Feb.