CU Boulder is partnering with a group of CU students, staff and faculty, led by CIRES fellow Matthew Burgess, to organize a dialogue series aimed at building empathy and understanding across political and other divisions. A group of students, staff, and faculty, in collaboration with the CU Dialogues Program, meets monthly on Thursdays on Zoom. Regular participants so far have included faculty and staff, undergraduate and graduate students, plus community members, Regents, and other elected officials. We welcome all viewpoints and perspectives and fundamentally aim to better understand the issues and where each of us is coming from, not to "win" a debate on any particular topic. Learn more about the series here, or sign up via Google form here. 

Interested in building bridges across the aisle to address climate change? This event will feature panelists from politically diverse and bipartisan-oriented youth climate advocacy groups in a conversation with a CU student audience.

Moderated by Matt Burgess, assistant professor of environmental studies and director, Center for Social and Environmental Futures

Panelists: 

• Chris Barnard, national policy director, American Conservation Coalition
• Jameka Hodnett, Green for All campaign director, Dream.org
• Sarah Jensen, MENV student and co-founder of American Conservation Coalition Boulder chapter
• Emily Nocito, environmental studies PhD student and founder of 10 by 2020

Register here for in-person or virtual attendance: https://web.cvent.com/event/7adb9fc3-9b17-4571-911f-b274cccf9f46/summary

Part of the C-SEF "Come Together" Seminar Series 

Vapors and Aerosols: NIST’s forensic approach to arson and cannabis intoxication

Jennifer Berry,
National Institute of Standards and Technology

"The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is world-renowned for making standards and precise measurements with advanced measurement techniques. The Fluid Characterization Group, part of the Boulder-based Materials Measurement Laboratory, is rooted in precise thermodynamic measurements of fuels and has successfully developed technologies and methods for forensic vapor and aerosol detection. The group’s Dynamic Vapor Microextraction (DVME) was originally developed for vapor pressure measurements of low volatility, unstable molecules but has been expanded towards a variety of forensic applications, particularly for the detection of arson from fire debris. The instrumental development for this new application needs to be thoroughly planned and designed to encompass a large number of factors and their interactions, breaking from a one-factor-at-a-time method. Conducting a sensitivity analysis permits the exploration of multiple variables at the same time while limiting the number of experiments needed. When coupling a sensitivity analysis with DVME in a fire debris study, we found that both the metric and the experimental plan played a crucial role in determining the importance of different instrumental and sample factors. Beyond fire debris, the group has also been developing and testing breath collection techniques to detect cannabinoids in breath after cannabis use. Aerosols and condensed vapors will be collected with two different devices to investigate changes in breath compounds and concentrations after cannabis use. While cannabinoids have been detected in breath aerosols, additional explorations into exhaled breath condensate as a part of a 128- participant study will use a cannabinoid targeted and metabolomics untargeted approach to explore if this type of noninvasive breath collection is a valid method as well. With the growth of forensic research in NIST Boulder, numerous opportunities are available for collaborations, internships, and postdoctoral fellowships at NIST Boulder."

Join CIRES Director Waleed Abdalati for December 2022's CIRES Town Hall for both campus and NOAA-based employees.

Zoom: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/93972817527

Meeting ID: 939 7281 7527

Fires of Unusual Size: Future of Extreme Wildfires in the Continental United States

Thursday, December 8, 2022, 11 AM - 12 PM MT

Presented by: Jilmarie Stephens, University of Colorado Boulder

Register in advance for this meeting: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcvde-qpj8qHty4ap9DX1Xi9fY-g...

After registering, you will receive an email confirmation containing information about how to join the meeting. 

ABSTRACT:

Recent observed increases in wildfire activity across the contiguous United States (U.S.) and the increasingly apparent effects of climate change on fire regimes have created novel challenges for fire and ecosystem managers requiring more robust information on changes in future fire risk, especially for the largest fire events, over the next several decades. Today, the majority of wildfire ignitions are caused by human activities—so capturing anthropogenic aspects of changing fire activity beyond those associated with climate change is critically important. In this work, we use a Bayesian statistical model that includes projections of where people will be located on the landscape, as well as projections of future atmospheric conditions from downscaled climate model simulations using a moderate warming trajectory (RCP 4.5), to make predictions regarding the number, size of the largest fire, and overall area burned by wildfires in each Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) level-3 ecoregion across the U.S. over the next four decades. By 2020-2060, we project an average increase in the number of fires (+56%) and burned area (+59%) across the U.S. compared to the historical period (1984-2019). For the largest fire events, we find nearly ubiquitous increases across all ecoregions (contiguous U.S. average +63%). Overall, our results suggest that climate change in the coming decades will drive more frequent occurrences of fires in regions where wildfire was rare (i.e., much of the eastern U.S.), and unprecedented increases in the size of the largest fires in regions where fires were common (i.e., in the western United States). 

About the speaker:

Dr. Jilmarie Stephens is a bio-micro-meteorologist studying ecosystem-atmosphere interactions in a changing climate, from surface layer turbulence to ecosystem scale climate, carbon balance, and wildfire regimes. Jilmarie received her B.S. and M.S. in Atmospheric Science at UC Davis and her Ph.D. in Soil Science from the University of British Columbia. Her doctoral work focused on long term trends in Boreal forest ecosystems using both flux tower measurements and ecophysiological modeling techniques. She also studied the impact of an insect infestation event on the carbon and water fluxes at an aspen stand. Her postdoc at NC CASC and Earth Lab is part of the Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASC) 2021-2023 Climate Adaptation Postdoctoral Fellows Program focusing on the “Future of Fire”. Her research focuses on understanding future changing wildfire regimes across the US using past fire and climate observations and numerical modeling for projected climate variables under various climate change scenarios.

The CIRES annual Seasonal Celebration is back in person this year!

Save the date:

Glenn Miller Ballroom in the University Memorial Center (UMC)

Friday, December 9, 2022
Starting at 4:00 pm 

RSVP deadline has passed. Email Linda.Pendergrass@colorado.edu with questions.

Our special visitor from the North Pole will be making a separate appearance in the CIRES Atrium this year on Tuesday, December 6 and Wednesday, December 7. This is a separate event from the December 9 celebration.