Warden Winner Finds One Degree of Separation Between a Hot, Sunny Day and American Monsoon

A Desert Research Institute graduate research assistant who has shown that a single degree rise in sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of California can stimulate summer monsoons in the Desert Southwest has received DRI’s 2003 Colin Warden Award. Dorothea Ivanova, a Ph.D. candidate in atmospheric sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno, applied an advanced forecasting model to connect an increase in the gulf’s summer sea surface temperatures from 29 to 30 degrees Centigrade with the development of major regional thunderstorm systems that periodically caused fatal flash floods in southern Nevada.

Ivanova has been working under the guidance of Dr. David Mitchell, a DRI atmospheric physicist who has been studying the monsoon-sea surface temperature connection in collaboration with Mexican scientists for about five years. The American Monsoon is responsible for significant summer precipitation in Arizona and New Mexico, and can also significantly influence weather throughout the Intermountain West and into the Great Plains. Massive, widespread range fires across much of the central and eastern Great Basin several years ago were caused by monsoonal lightning storms.

The $1,000 award is named for Colin Warden, a Washoe Medical Center electrician and an ardent environmentalist who died in 1991. His family and friends established the endowment to promote environmental research by graduate students working at DRI or supervised by DRI scientists.

A Desert Research Institute graduate research assistant who has shown that a single degree rise in sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of California can stimulate summer monsoons in the Desert Southwest has received DRI’s 2003 Colin Warden Award. Dorothea Ivanova, a Ph.D. candidate in atmospheric sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno, applied an advanced forecasting model to connect an increase in the gulf’s summer sea surface temperatures from 29 to 30 degrees Centigrade with the development of major regional thunderstorm systems that periodically caused fatal flash floods in southern Nevada.

Ivanova has been working under the guidance of Dr. David Mitchell, a DRI atmospheric physicist who has been studying the monsoon-sea surface temperature connection in collaboration with Mexican scientists for about five years. The American Monsoon is responsible for significant summer precipitation in Arizona and New Mexico, and can also significantly influence weather throughout the Intermountain West and into the Great Plains. Massive, widespread range fires across much of the central and eastern Great Basin several years ago were caused by monsoonal lightning storms.

The $1,000 award is named for Colin Warden, a Washoe Medical Center electrician and an ardent environmentalist who died in 1991. His family and friends established the endowment to promote environmental research by graduate students working at DRI or supervised by DRI scientists.