Date:
Monday, September 14, 2015, 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location:
Haller Hall (GM 102)
Speaker: Dr. Inez Fung (UC Berkeley)
Abstract:
California is in the midst of a four-year drought. How do some trees survive the drought? We have been carrying out intensive high-frequency monitoring of the water cycle in a small (4000 m2) steep (35o slope) watershed dubbed “Rivendell” in the Angelo Coast Range Reserve in Northern California. The data have revealed many surprises. The water table ~20 meters below the surface rises by about 1 meter after the first storms of the season. Adjacent evergreen trees transpire in different seasons. We present a simple model of the fast processes that redistribute water in the subsurface, and hypothesize that the weathered bedrock could be a non-negligible reservoir of moisture to sustain trees through dry seasons.
(Please see attached background reading for Dr. Fung's upcoming talk.)
About Inez:
Inez Fung has been studying climate change and the carbon cycle for the last 30 year. She is an architect of large-scale mathematical modeling approaches and numerical models to represent the geographic and temporal variations of sources and sinks of CO2, dust and other trace substances around the globe.
Inez Fung received her S.B. in Applied Mathematics and her Sc.D. in Meteorology from MIT. She joined the Berkeley faculty in 1998. She is a Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
Fung is the US lead of the 2014 report “Climate Change: Evidence and Causes” published jointly by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences. She is a subject in a biography series for middle-school readers “Women’s Adventure in Science” launched by the National Academy of Sciences. he title of her biography is “Forecast Earth”.
 | link_wrr2014.pdf | 6.71 MB |
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