Hello Everyone! My name is Chris Colose and I am a graduate student in the Department of Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences at the University of Albany.
I was born and raised here in the Capital Region, but earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. My interests reside largely in studying how Earth and other atmospheres operate, characterizing their behavior, and understanding how they evolve on timescales of decades to billions of years.
My graduate work, under the guidance of Mathias Vuille, involves researching the evolution of Earth’s climate over the last 10,000 years or so, a time period that we call the Holocene. This is the geological epoch that marks the retreat of the great ice sheets of the last ice age, and also the time interval during which human civilization has grown and thrived. Our focus is in the tropics, where we interpret records such as ice cores, speleothems from caves, tree rings, lake sediments, etc to obtain useful information on how key climate features like the Asian Monsoon or El Niño have changed over time. We are also working on this topic with Allegra LeGrande at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, where I will spend my time during the summer.
Studying the numerous processes which can force the climate to change, and the feedback processes which dictate how much it changes, also cuts into the heart of modern day global warming. I will spend some time on this blog discussing the underlying physics of planetary temperature and the greenhouse effect, the evidence that humans are changing the climate, and some future projections.
Another interesting climate-related discipline that I enjoy writing on is the characterization of atmospheres on other planets, and I will discuss these topics when newsworthy or where an educational opportunity presents itself. For example, over 500 new planets have been discovered outside our solar system within the last two decades, and a key question that emerges from this work is whether some of them may potentially be habitable. This involves understanding the climate conditions that are conducive to the presence of liquid water, and also being able to use the climate histories of ancient Earth or planets such as Venus or Mars as a template for the range of exotic conditions that can arise.
I have also written for other blogs, including RealClimate.org and SkepticalScience.com. My hobbies involve outdoor activities such as camping, rock climbing, sky diving, kayaking, as well as the occasional movie or random adventures with friends.