Lisa J. Graumlich
Director, School of Natural Resources
PhD, University of Washington, 1985
Office: Biological Sciences East, Room 325 [Map]
Phone: (520) 621-7257
Email: lisag@cals.arizona.edu
For the past two decades Lisa Graumlich has worked to refine our understanding of the nature of climate variability on decade to centennial time scales and to explore how such variability affects vegetation communities. For many years, the focus of her effort was upper treeline. She also has a long-standing interest in using past records to understand the significance of twentieth century droughts. She is currently extending her work on decadal-scale severe droughts to understand how decadal-scale climate variability impacts ecosystem goods and services; to develop the tools and capacity to integrate human history with new data about the natural history of the earth at global scales and over centuries to millennia; and to use tree rings to reconstruct spatial variations in snowpack spanning several centuries or more for the Upper Colorado River Basin, Upper Yellowstone/Missouri River Basin, and the Columbia and Saskatchewan River Headwaters. The resulting high-resolution maps of past snowpack will, in turn, be used to understand how ocean sea surface temperatures (e.g., El Niņo, Pacific Decadal Oscillation) influence snowpack in the West.