Climate & Environment

Electricity, air and plastic recycling

Megan Maneval — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 14:42:20 +0000

Electricity, air and plastic recycling Megan Maneval Thu, 06/26/2025 - 08:42

A collaboration between four fellows in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute shows how electricity can be used to impart "superoxide powers" to oxygen gas molecules from air, enabling the efficient recycling of PET plastics.

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Wildfires threaten water quality for years after they burn

Megan Maneval — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 18:01:53 +0000

Wildfires threaten water quality for years after they burn Megan Maneval Tue, 06/24/2025 - 12:01

CIRES

CIRES-led research used big data to analyze more than 500 river basins—burned and unburned—to create and analyze the first large-scale dataset of post-fire water quality.

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Beneath crumbling walls: How rock glaciers took over the southern Rockies

Megan Maneval — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:54:18 +0000

Beneath crumbling walls: How rock glaciers took over the southern Rockies Megan Maneval Tue, 06/24/2025 - 09:54

INSTAAR

Rock glaciers are everywhere—at least in the Colorado Rockies. New research from Robert and Suzanne Anderson investigates how they formed and what benefits they might provide for alpine ecosystems.

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Mortenson Center innovations delivering clean water to more than 16 million worldwide

Megan Maneval — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:36:04 +0000

Mortenson Center innovations delivering clean water to more than 16 million worldwide Megan Maneval Mon, 06/23/2025 - 12:36

College of Engineering and Applied Science

��ɫ��Ƶ's Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience is building a new model for global water access, one that is grounded in a deep understanding of why so many past efforts have fallen short.

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Farm-diversification research wins top international prize

Megan Maneval — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 19:11:14 +0000

Farm-diversification research wins top international prize Megan Maneval Wed, 06/18/2025 - 13:11

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

��ɫ��Ƶ’s Zia Mehrabi is one of three researchers named international champions of the Frontiers Planet Prize for research that finds environmental and social benefits of agricultural diversification.

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Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years

Daniel William Strain — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 05:47:07 +0000

Chasing hail: Researchers fly drones into storms as part of largest US hail study in 40 years Daniel William… Tue, 06/17/2025 - 23:47

Daniel Strain

��ɫ��Ƶ researchers follow a storm brewing in south central Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ɫ��Ƶ)

Gray clouds swirl above a dusty highway in eastern Colorado between the towns of Akron and Atwood—what’s left of a thunderstorm that rolled through this stretch of prairie and rangeland just minutes before.

Wind whistles through patches of stubbly grass nearby. Then a hiss and a pop break the silence. A group of researchers release a blast of compressed air to fling a flying drone from a metal scaffold, or “catapult,” sitting on top of a white SUV. The uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) measures more than 6 feet from wingtip to wingtip. It catches the wind, and its rear propeller buzzes to life, lifting the plane dozens of feet into the air in a matter of seconds.

Céu Gómez-Faulk makes adjustments to the RAAVEN drone. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ɫ��Ƶ)

The IRISS team rides out an oncoming storm near Wichita, Kansas. (Patrick Campbell/��ɫ��Ƶ)

The chase is on.

Aerospace engineering sciences Professor Brian Argrow and his team at the ��ɫ��Ƶ have joined a research project called the In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains, or ICECHIP. For six weeks this summer, scientists from 15 U.S. research institutions and three overseas are criss-crossing the country from Colorado east to Iowa and from Texas to North Dakota.

They’re searching for summer thunderstorms.

The group is exploring the conditions that give rise to hail in this part of the country—peaking in the summer and causing billions of dollars of damage every year. In the United States, hail is most common in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and nearby regions, which are sometimes dubbed “hail alley.” Today, ice the size of grapes and even bigger litter the side of Colorado’s State Highway 63.

The campaign is led by Rebecca Adams-Selin at the company Atmospheric and Environmental Research and is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. It’s the largest effort to study hail in the United States in 40 years.

The researchers hope to understand not just how ice forms miles above the ground, but also how homeowners and builders can protect their properties from dangerous weather. They’ll do that by using radar to peer inside hailstorms. They’ll collect and freeze hailstones, and they’ll crush hail in vice-like devices to see how strong it is. Argrow’s team is usings its drone to map the swaths of hail that storms leave behind them in their wake.

“It is about saving lives and saving property,” said Argrow, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and director of the Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) research center at ��ɫ��Ƶ. “We’re working with meteorologists and atmospheric scientists trying to increase warning times to give people a chance to get to safety and work with engineers and insurance companies to build better infrastructure to withstand these onslaughts.”

His team pilots the plane, known as the RAAVEN, short for Robust Autonomous Airborne Vehicle - Endurant and Nimble, north toward the rear flank of the thunderstorm. Then, they jump into two SUVs and follow the drone as it flies as low as 120 feet above them. A camera in the plane’s belly captures the ice trailing behind the storm. From that vantage point, the landscape, normally brown dotted with green, now also has pearly white patches for hundreds of yards in either direction.

For Céu Gómez-Faulk, who’s piloting the drone today, the sight is a testament to thunderstorms.

“It’s awe-inspiring in a very serious sort of way,” said Gómez-Faulk, a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences.

Credit: College of Engineering and Applied Science

Dark skies

Five days earlier, Argrow and his team from ��ɫ��Ƶ join the ICECHIP armada at a Phillips 66 gas station in Greensburg, Kansas. The crew includes three graduate students, two IRISS employees and Eric Frew, professor of aerospace engineering sciences. They’re marking the first day of the project’s field season, or what the researchers call Intensive Observation Period 1 (IOP 1).

Judging by the conditions, the team should have plenty to study today. Weathervanes sitting on top of vans whip in circles as gusts blow a misty rain through Greensburg, a town in south central Kansas that is home to just over 700 people.

What makes hail

When conditions are right in states like Kansas and Colorado, winds blowing over the prairie can start to lift upward, forming a powerful column of rising air. These updrafts can push clouds from the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, up to the colder stratosphere, which begins miles above Earth’s surface.

Within those towering, cauliflower-like clouds, tiny drops of water may freeze, then bounce around in the air—a sort of atmospheric game of Plinko.

That’s how hail is born.

“It starts with what we call a hail embryo, or ice,” said Katja Friedrich, professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at ��ɫ��Ƶ. “It goes through the cloud, and it accumulates supercooled liquid, which is liquid that is below freezing. The embryos accumulate more and more until they fall.”

But there’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about what happens inside the clouds.

To help find out, Friedrich is participating in the ICECHIP campaign through an effort that’s separate from Argrow’s team and its drone. Over the summer, two researchers in her lab, Jack Whiting and Brady Herron, are traveling with the armada in a red pickup truck. They’re using a device called a microwave radiometer to collect measurements of the air that rushes into hailstorms from outside—exploring how environmental conditions can feed a storm to keep it churning, or even cause it to die off.

“It’s my dream to be doing this, to be in the field studying severe weather,” said Whiting, who graduated from ��ɫ��Ƶ with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric and oceanic sciences in spring 2025. “There’s a good chance that these events are going to become more frequent in the future because of climate change, so it’s really important to understand these dangerous storms.”

“This is relatively typical this time of the year, mid-May for the Great Plains. That’s when the storms really turn up and pass through,” Argrow said. “If you live in this area, you know what this means.”

In Greensburg, they definitely do.

In 2007, a tornado ripped through the heart of this community, damaging or destroying more than 1,400 homes and buildings and killing 10 people. Just hours after the ICECHIP crew departed on May 18 this spring, another tornado touched down south of Greensburg. It traveled 11 miles before dying out, and no injuries were reported.

Argrow is no stranger to the danger storms bring. He grew up in Stroud, Oklahoma, in the heart of Tornado Alley and remembers sheltering in his family’s storm cellar during severe weather warnings.

The engineer and his colleagues previously worked on a project, led by long-time collaborator. Adam Houston of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, called Targeted Observation by Radar and UAS of Supercells (TORUS). Over two seasons, the group flew RAAVEN aircraft into supercell thunderstorms, the phenomena that give rise to dangerous tornadoes.

But while storm-chasers may pay a lot of attention to those kinds of weather events, hail causes more damage than tornadoes every year, said Ian Giammanco. He’s the lead research meteorologist for the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), a non-profit organization supported by property insurance and reinsurance companies.

Since 2012, hail has caused an estimated $280 billion worth of damage in the United States, according to IBHS estimates. The largest piece of hail ever discovered was about 8 inches wide, the size of a large cantaloupe.

“Our role is to understand how we can design better building materials to withstand hail,” said Giammanco, whose team is joining the ICECHIP expedition on the road. “Whether it’s a lot of small hail, or these really big hailstones, we want to understand what that risk looks like.”

Ellington Smith, a graduate student on Argrow’s team, was an undergrad at Iowa State University in spring 2023 when hailstorms erupted around the state, flattening corn fields.

“Knowing what hail can do to farmland, its’ really important to be able to quantify the damage—figuring out why these hailstorms happen and how to better predict them,” Smith said.

Intrepid aircraft

Adams-Selin and the ICECHIP team are taking what she calls a “holistic” approach to studying those kinds of dangers.

The study armada is something to behold: At the start of the field season, the ICECHIP campaign included around 100 researchers traveling in more than 20 vehicles—including pickup trucks with mesh canopies overhead to protect them from hail damage and two Doppler on Wheels trucks. These massive vehicles carry portable, swiveling radar dishes that can peer into the heart of hailstorms.

“ICECHIP is 100% NSF funded,” Adams-Selin said. “If you want to know who is responsible for improved hail forecasts, better understanding of hail science and any of these technological advances that we are using, like mobile radar, that is all NSF funding.”

The IRISS team depends on a vehicle that is a little smaller—the RAAVEN.

It’s a tough little drone. The aircraft is based off a kit designed by the company Ritewing RC. This same design inspired a storm-chasing drone that appeared in the 2024 summer blockbuster Twisters. The body of the RAAVEN is made from the same kind of foam that’s in your car bumper. It also carries sensors for measuring wind speeds and air pressure, temperature and humidity.

If the RAAVEN is flying with the wind, it can hit speeds of 75 miles per hour or more, and the aircraft can fly for up to two hours uninterrupted.

“Radar can only tell you so much,” said Frew, who joins Argrow on the ICECHIP campaign. “To really further our understanding of the atmosphere, you have to be in it.”

For ICECHIP, the team also added a 360-degree camera that drops out of the belly of the RAAVEN after it launches.

The IRISS team’s key role on the ICECHIP campaign is to measure the swaths of hail that storms leave in their wake.

A storm builds near Greensburg, Kansas. (Credit: Patrick Campbell/��ɫ��Ƶ)

The team doesn’t fly the RAAVEN directly into storms for ICECHIP. Instead, it stays safely behind the bad weather, soaring in a zig-zag pattern in the wake of hailstorms as they billow across the landscape. Using the drone’s camera in real-time, the researchers view the area below that’s covered in ice. They can then measure the width of these hail swaths, capturing how big a storm’s path of destruction can grow. Argrow likens it to “a snail that leaves a trail.”

Federal Aviation Administration rules require Argrow’s team to stay in sight of the RAAVEN at all times. To do that, the researchers get in their SUVs.

Gómez-Faulk explained that the RAAVEN is semi-autonomous. Pilots like him can control where the aircraft goes, but it’s also programed to follow a sort of digital marker the team refers to as a “carrot.”

“There’s a carrot guide point that we set off some distance from the car, usually in front of the car,” he said. “The aircraft is going to chase that guide point as we drive.”

Heart pounding

Back in Greensburg, Frew emphasizes that safety is the number one priority of the IRISS team. But he acknowledges that central Kansas at the height of storm season may be an odd place to find an aerospace engineer.

Before Frew started working on projects like TORUS and ICECHIP, he didn’t know a lot about weather. His time on these studies, however, has taught him to respect the power of storms—and what engineers can accomplish when they bring their work out of the lab and into the real, windy world.

“The first time I did it, my heart was pounding. I didn’t know what to expect,” Frew said. “In order to understand this environment, someone has to go into it and take the measurements, and that’s what we’re here for.”

IRISS snapshots from the road

Tracking a storm near Wichita Falls, Texas

Taking a break in Tucumcari, New Mexico

Seeing hail in northeast Colorado

Posing for a photo in eastern New Mexico

Finding hail near Morton, Texas

For six weeks this summer, scientists from across the country, including researchers at ��ɫ��Ƶ, are criss-crossing the Great Plains to investigate how hailstorms form—and how homeowners and builders can protect their properties.

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CUriosity: Are sharks really as scary as their reputation?

Daniel William Strain — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 17:23:21 +0000

CUriosity: Are sharks really as scary as their reputation? Daniel William… Tue, 06/17/2025 - 11:23

Rachel Sauer

In CUriosity, experts across the ��ɫ��Ƶ campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, Andrew Martin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, answers: “Are sharks really as scary as their reputation?”

Credit: Adobe Stock

A 14-foot male white shark, the largest ever tagged, is currently making its way north up the Atlantic coast—last week pinging 22 miles off Cape Hatteras—just in time for the 50th anniversary of “Jaws” Friday.

We still need a bigger boat: Read more about the 50th anniversary of "Jaws"

Yes, it’s been 50 years since moviegoers were scared out of the water by a film that presented sharks as terrifying monsters of the deep. Now, it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction in sharks’ scary reputation.

Andrew Martin, a ��ɫ��Ƶ professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, has studied sharks as a PhD student at the University of Hawaii and throughout his career, which has included working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He addressed some common conceptions—or misconceptions—about sharks to help illuminate whether they’re as scary as they seem.

Fact or fiction: “Jaws” was good for sharks.

Fiction.

“Jaws” was a terrible thing for sharks and a terrible thing for biology. I think it scared people away from the ocean, which was a bummer, and I know Peter Benchley, author of the novel “Jaws,” has come around and realized his mistake. We were easy prey for him, in a way, because we were already a little bit scared of the ocean. I mean, what could be more terrifying? All you want to do is have fun at the beach.

Previously in CUriosity

CUriosity: A 50-year-old Soviet spacecraft will soon crash to Earth. Why, and where will it land?

Or read more CUriosity stories here

However, encounters between humans and great whites are usually with surfers, who look like seals from below. It’s really rare for a shark to go after someone.

Fact or fiction: All sharks will attack humans.

Fiction.

That’s definitely not true. There are hundreds of species of sharks, and I can count the number of species that have a record of attacking humans on one hand.

Fact or fiction: Sharks are apex predators.

Depends.

Great white sharks are pretty much an apex predator because they will feed on things that are also very high in the food chain. I don’t know how useful the term “apex” is, though, because it implies there’s only one thing at the very top, and if that’s the case then it’s humans because we literally eat everything. In general, sharks are high on the food chain but in some cases not super high. In some food chains they’re not even as high as tuna.

Fact or fiction: Sharks can detect a single drop of blood in the water

Depends.

Most things living in water have a very good sensory capacity for molecules. Still, I’ve been on shark boats where they chum—and it’s not a little bit of chum. It’s a lot of gory stuff they’re dumping in the water—and it still took a lot of time for sharks to come.

Fact or fiction: If sharks stop moving, they die.

Fiction.

Andrew Martin

There are a bunch of species that can sit on the ocean bottom. It’s also true that they do need to pass water over their gills, but they don’t have to move all the time. Some of them do have a pretty high activity level, and they’re moving a lot, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to die if they stop. They’re really well designed to move through the water, so it doesn’t cost them much energy. Because they’re probably always hungry, they seem to be in motion all the time, and that’s the life of almost everything on this planet.

Fact or fiction: Sharks haven’t changed since prehistoric times.

Depends.

We don’t have a good fossil record for their bodies, since they have cartilage instead of bones, but their teeth fossilize really well, and we have really good evidence that a lot of shark teeth haven’t changed much over time. However, we do know—mostly from phylogenetic reconstructions—that some sharks have evolved and changed over time. In the group of sharks that great whites are in, named the Lamniformes, there are several divergent groups of species that have evolved the ability to elevate their temperature well above the temperature of their environment. This ability, which involves changes in many different aspects of their biology, has evolved more than once.

A good example of this is thresher sharks that have a really long tail, and they can go through schools of fish, whip that tail around and knock out fish. Their body and brain temperatures are warmer than the water, so they can generate a lot of power—power is proportional to temperature—and keep their nervous system and brain warmer, so they can process information faster. The result is that they are better, more efficient and perhaps scarier predators if you are a small fish.

This summer marks the 50th anniversary of the movie "Jaws," which made generations of audiences afraid to go in the water again. It also created a lot of misconceptions about sharks, says ��ɫ��Ƶ biologist Andrew Martin.

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Carson Bruns explores nanotech that turns plastic into fertilizer

Megan Maneval — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:47:52 +0000

Carson Bruns explores nanotech that turns plastic into fertilizer Megan Maneval Mon, 06/16/2025 - 11:47

With a RIO seed grant, the Emergent Nanotechnology Lab team has begun research to develop new bioplastics made to be used as fertilizer at end-of-life.

With a RIO seed grant, the Emergent Nanotechnology Lab team has begun research to develop new bioplastics made to be used as fertilizer at end of life.

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Groundwater levels in the US Southwest more sensitive to climate shifts than in the Pacific Northwest

Megan Maneval — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:45:10 +0000

Groundwater levels in the US Southwest more sensitive to climate shifts than in the Pacific Northwest Megan Maneval Mon, 06/16/2025 - 11:45

CIRES

Scientists used fossil groundwater and model simulations to identify regional differences in aquifer response during the Last Glacial Termination, a period of warming, ice sheet loss and major environmental change that occurred between 20,000 and 11,000 years ago.

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Rainy spring may be bad news for fire season. Here’s what you can do about it

Yvaine Ye — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:35:30 +0000

Rainy spring may be bad news for fire season. Here’s what you can do about it Yvaine Ye Mon, 06/16/2025 - 09:35

Yvaine Ye

This May, Denver saw more than 4 inches of rain, doubling the city’s historic average and outpacing famously rainy places like Seattle.

While the additional moisture has painted the Front Range a lush green, to grassland ecologist Katharine Suding, it’s concerning.

“Wet springs mean more plant growth,” said Suding, distinguished professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “That growth would turn into fuel later in the season.”

Without interventions to reduce the amount of dry vegetation in the fall and winter, the region could face intense and fast-spreading wildfires if one breaks out.

Katharine Suding. (Credit: Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado)

To Suding, this spring felt all too familiar. In 2021, a wet spring set the stage for the Marshall Fire later in December. The fast-moving fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder and its surrounding suburbs like Louisville and Superior.

While forest fires tend to receive more attention, grassland fires are becoming a bigger problem nationwide. Research has suggested that in the United States, grassland and shrubland fires are burning more land and destroying more homes than forest fires.

“We should think about grasslands far differently than forests,” said Suding, standing in front of a grassland in Superior that the Marshall Fire swept through. “Knowing how to manage forests for fires does not necessarily mean that we can take that knowledge and apply it to the grassland system at all.”

As out-of-control wildfires rage in places like the Canadian prairies, Suding spoke to ��ɫ��Ƶ Today about these fast-moving grassland fires and potential ways to manage them.

What makes grassland fires so dangerous?

People might think forests are riskier, because there’s more biomass to burn. And that’s absolutely the case. But in grasslands, fires can burn really fast under hot, windy conditions. They can also spread very quickly and even jump barriers we once thought would stop them, like paved roads.

For example, the Marshall Fire crossed the U.S. Interstate 36. Some of the intense, fast-moving fire characteristics that we thought were mostly a forest fire problem are now occurring in grassland fires as well.

For states like Colorado with elevated grassland fire risks, when does the fire season begin?

In grasslands, fires typically start when the green vegetation turns brown at the end of their growing season. That’s usually August, with peak fire danger in October and November. But as the climate warms, we’re now extending the fire season into winter. The Marshall Fire happened in December. Fires are even popping up in early spring, before new green growth has a chance to return.

Where else are grassland wildfires becoming a growing concern?

Many places are starting to realize they face grassland fire risks, with Colorado seeing some of the earliest impacts. But it’s happening in California, Texas, Oklahoma, and throughout the Southwest as well.

How is climate change shifting the fire patterns?

Colorado and many other grassland regions are getting hotter and drier. That means plants may stop growing, or senesce, earlier when it’s too dry, leaving behind dry, dead material that sits on the landscape for longer. That’s what happened the year of the Marshall fire, and it’s happening more and more often.

We are also seeing increasing wind speed in the fall and winter in areas like Colorado and California. The combination of high wind and dry vegetation is the riskiest situation for grasslands.

What can be done to reduce fire risks in grasslands?

It isn't quite clear what exactly we can do to make these grasslands less risky for the people that live right next to them, because we’re just starting to understand these fires.

At ��ɫ��Ƶ, we’re working with a group of local partners, including Boulder County, the city authorities of Boulder, Superior and Louisville, to try out some techniques. For example, we have tested grazing, which uses cattle or goats to eat down tall grasses. We’re also testing out mowing, as well as prescribed burning to reduce fuel in a controlled way.

Unlike forests, where you might thin trees and not have to return for years, grass regrows quickly. So, all of these interventions have to happen multiple times in one summer.

Some preliminary research suggests a combination of grazing and prescribed burning may work better than either alone, but there’s still a lot to learn. With funding from the Joint Fire Science Program, we are just on the cusp of trying to figure out how we can manage fires without removing all the grasses and turning the area into just a dust bowl.

For those living near fire-prone grasslands, is there something they can do to make their home more resilient?

One thing to do is avoid having tall, dead plants, as well as plants that catch on fire quickly, around their homes. The City of Boulder is encouraging people to remove junipers, highly flammable shrubs, from their yards. Planting native wildflower plants instead would be helpful, because they tend to be less flammable. Also, reducing vegetation density around homes can reduce risk.

��ɫ��Ƶ Today regularly publishes Q&As with our faculty members weighing in on news topics through the lens of their scholarly expertise and research/creative work. The responses here reflect the knowledge and interpretations of the expert and should not be considered the university position on the issue. All publication content is subject to edits for clarity, brevity and university style guidelines.

Ecologist Katharine Suding shares insights on the increasing risks of grassland fire across the country.

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Large plumes of smoke from the Marshall Fire were visible over Superior, CO. (Credit: Tristantech/Wikimedia)

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Large plumes of smoke from the Marshall Fire were visible over Superior, CO. (Credit: Tristantech/Wikimedia)

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