Latest Joseph Ortiz Stories

A group of researchers have studied the history of drought in the Pacific Northwest during the last 6,000 years, a time that spans the mid-Holocene geological epoch to the present. The goal of the research was to improve the understanding of drought history because the instrumental record of drought only goes back a few hundred years and at relatively few locations.Their work extended the drought history of the Pacific Northwest back much longer than the tree ring record, which provides...

Better understanding of the long-term history of El Nino will help enhance short-term prediction of this global climate phenomenon and help mitigate associated natural disastersFor more than a decade, Dr. Joseph Ortiz, associate professor of geology at Kent State University and part of an international team of National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers, has been studying long-term climate variability associated with El Niño. The researchers' goal is to help climatologists better...