Freshwater Colloquium – From Weather to Paleo: Capturing the Continuum of Climate Variability

Join the School of Freshwater Sciences for a Colloquium with guest speaker: Dr. Raphaël Hébert

Weather and climate variability span a continuum of timescales, from day-to-day fluctuations to millennial-scale changes, yet these regimes are often studied separately. My work explores how to bring these scales together within a unified framework that captures spatial structure, temporal persistence, and dynamical linkages across scales by combining diverse environmental datasets. I will first introduce my ongoing work with Prof. Sergey Kravtsov on data-driven forecasting from daily to seasonal timescales using high-resolution reanalysis products that integrate instrumental and satellite observations since 1980. I will then turn to earlier work using longer instrumental records, climate model simulations, and paleoclimate reconstructions to examine how the spatial and temporal covariance structure of climate variability evolves from decadal to centennial and millennial timescales, highlighting both what we know—and what remains uncertain—about long-timescale climate variability. Together, these perspectives suggest that similar statistical structures may underlie climate variability across a wide range of timescales and point toward new ways of connecting modern observations with paleoclimate evidence.

This presentation is open to students, faculty, staff, alumni and the public.