Valerie talks about tree rings and the jet stream in the Energy Transition Show podcast.  Listen to it here: https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-65-climate-science-part-9-jet-stream/

I primarily cover submissions about paleoclimate, climate variability, and ecosystem disturbances.  Please send your exciting new science findings to Geophysical Research Letters, I look forward to reading them!

Amy, Matt, and Soumaya representing the LTRR at the TFOB!

Guobao Xu has joined the lab as a post-doc in January 2018.  Guobao has received a scholarship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and will be in the Trouet Lab in Tucson for two years.  His research interests focus on stable isotopes in tree rings and their application for climate reconstruction, ecology, and carbon cycle research.  Geographically, Guobao's research focuses primarily on the Tibetan Plateau. 

Congratulations, Amy, on passing your comps in January!

Our new paper in which we reconstruct the position of the summer North Atlantic Jet over the last 300 years is out now in Nature Communications (open access): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02699-3
We used tree rings from the Balkans and from the British Isles -two locations with climates that are strongly influenced by the position of the North Atlantic Jet (NAJ) - for our reconstruction.  We find an increase of NAJ variance since the 1960s that is unprecendented over the last 300 years and that corresponds to a variance increase in climate proxies in the North Pacific ocean.  Such variance increases correspond to more frequent summer NAJ extremes, which result in more frequent summer extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires) in northwestern and southeastern Europe. 
A UA press release describes the relevance of our paper in layman's terms: https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/jet-stream-changes-1960s-linked-more-extreme-weather

Valerie received a Udall Center Fellowship, which gives her a course-release for Spring 2018.  Yay!
more info on the Udall Center's webpage

Embroidery artist Bonnie Peterson made a beautiful piece based on our Belmecheri et al. (2016) Sierra Nevada SWE reconstruction that is currently part of an exposition at Yosemite National Park Museum. 

Qichao Yao published the first paper from his PhD in GRL.  In this paper, Qichao presents the first tree-ring based fire history for northeast China that goes back to 1774 and uses it to investigate climatic influences on past wildfire regimes.  A photo of a fire-scarred sample from Qichao's study was also selected as the cover of this GRL issue.  Cool stuff!