Climate Change Institute

Reuters interviewed Maine state climatologist and University of Maine faculty member Sean Birkel about tweets sharing inaccurate conclusions drawn from images from the Climate Reanalyzer, a platform for visualizing climate and weather datasets that he developed. Birkel, a research assistant professor at the Climate Change Institute and climate services specialist with University of Maine Cooperative […]

Daniel Sandweiss, a world-renowned researcher in Latin American archaeology and paleoclimatology, was named the 2022 Distinguished Maine Professor. This award is the highest faculty award, and honors a UMaine faculty member each year for excellence in teaching, research, and community service. Sandweiss, who has been at UMaine since 1993, teaches courses ranging from introductory anthropology […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $661,462 Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant to the University of Maine to upgrade a multiuser instrument in the Climate Change Institute. Over the last two decades, the University of Maine Climate Change Institute’s ICP-MS facility has conducted valuable climate, environmental, ecosystem and engineering research and training across the […]

Sean Birkel, state climatologist and assistant professor at the Climate Change Institute and Cooperative Extension at the University of Maine, spoke to News Center Maine for an article about the impact of climate change on Maine dairy farmers. Birkel said that while more arid regions of the country will get drier with the increasing temperatures, […]

El Nino has been a major driver of societal collapse, various catastrophes and cultural change in coastal Peru for millenia, but it isn’t the only culprit. In a new study, University of Maine researchers warn against over-interpreting the role climatic change, like an El Nino event, plays in societal and cultural transition. Dan Sandweiss, a […]

In an article debunking a tweet that used an image from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, Climate Fact Check noted that the Data Sources & Additional Information section on the Climate Reanalyzer website clearly mentions that climate trends should be inferred from long-term data. Thus, using the global temperature record on a single day […]

The rapid warming of the 20th century has reversed 900 years of cooling in the Gulf of Maine, according to a new study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, co-authored by the University of Maine and funded by the National Science Foundation. The Gulf of Maine has undergone recent, rapid ocean warming, but the […]

The scientific community now has a standard set of protocols for collecting data about volcanic ash known as tephra, thanks to an international team of researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Maine and various institutions across the country. Tephra is any airborne material produced by an explosive volcanic eruption that plays an […]

The Bangor Daily News and WMTW (Channel 8 in Portland) reported on a study co-authored by the University of Maine showing that climate change has reversed nearly a millennium of cooling in the Gulf of Maine over the past century. “Combining precisely dated geochemical data from the clam shells with state-of-the-art climate models provides a […]

Ivan Fernandez, distinguished Maine professor at the School of Forest Resources, Climate Change Institute and School of Food and Agriculture, was a panelist on the Maine Public radio show “Maine On Point” for an episode about how carbon sequestration in Maine can help slow climate change.