I’ve been traveling in North America for a few months now. This has required me not only to relearn how to drive on the right-hand side of the road, but also the Fahrenheit temperature scale. So this XKCD comic describes a day to day occurrence for me. This can be quite important, since when reported… Read more »
CSAG Blog
Reproducible El Niños
A lot of attention has been given to the consequences of the latest strong El Niño event. Were these a surprise? Where do we get our notions of what we expect? A lot of ‘big picture’ intuition about climate patterns and variation comes from some rather straightforward statistical methods. I wanted to briefly unpack a… Read more »
Graduation
We have a number of people who are completing, submitting, correcting, and graduating with their MS/PhD degrees. Here are some! Congratulations to all.
CSAG Director Prof Bruce Hewitson – University of Cape Town’s newest A-rated researcher
Professor Bruce Hewitson is UCT’s newest A-rated researcher following the latest round of National Research Foundation ratings. A-ratings are awarded to researchers who are “unequivocally recognised by their peers as leading international scholars in their field for the high quality and impact of their recent research outputs. Congratulations Bruce Original article HERE
Climate change and terrorism; it’s not one or the other
Paris has been on my mind more than other recent attacks, due to it being my uncontrollable place of birth, but there is no doubt that wherever the location or whatever the reason, a planned innocent-killing attack, either led by terrorist or anti-terrorist groups, should NOT be.
Community-Based Adaptation
In this blog I would like to talk about one of the best conferences I attended this year (2015), the “Ninth International Conference on Community-Based Adaptation” held in Nairobi. More than 400 scientists from around the world (over 90 countries) attended the conference. The theme of the conference was ‘Measuring and enhancing effective adaptation‘…. Read more »
Everything I needed to know about climate change I learned from Leonard Cohen
Okay, maybe not everything. However, when discussing climate science it’s inevitable at some point the conversation will turn to the subject of ‘the future’. Often in the form a question like “So what’s going to happen?”, at times meant in quite precise terms. In some ways it’s a quite flattening question. Unfortunately, I’m not very… Read more »
Applying the Weather at SASAS 2015
South African Society for Atmospheric Sciences (SASAS) organizes an annual conference, and this year, the event precipitated on the deep outskirts of Pretoria over 21-22 September. What sets this year apart is that, although officially attached to University of Pretoria, it was organized by a cross-institutional organizing committee composed entirely of women. The conference is… Read more »
Sunday Blues
During a conversation last week, a fellow CSAG-er casually mentioned that the probability of precipitation depended on the day of the week. I found this to be puzzling – after all, what does the weather know of the days of the week? A search of the literature uncovered that this theory is plausible, and that… Read more »