The weather man: Daniel Swain studies extreme floods. And droughts. And wildfires. Then he explains them to the rest of us.
The moment Daniel Swain wakes up, he gets whipped about by hurricane-force winds. “A Category 5, literally overnight, hits Acapulco,” says the 34-year-old climate scientist and self-described weather geek, who gets battered daily by the onslaught of catastrophic weather headlines: wildfires, megafloods, haboobs (an intense dust storm), atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones. Everyone’s asking: Did climate change cause these disasters? And, more and more, they want Swain to answer. … His ability to explain science to the masses—think the Carl Sagan of weather—has made him one of the media’s go-to climate experts. He’s a staff research scientist at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability who spends more than 1,100 hours each year on public-facing climate and weather communication, explaining whether (often, yes) and how climate change is raising the number and exacerbating the viciousness of weather disasters.
Related articles:
- Los Angeles Times: How California’s storms are projected to become more extreme with climate change
- Los Angeles Times: Woodland Hills reels from record-setting heat and rainfall as extreme weather takes toll
- Press Democrat: Real-time map shows water levels, flood risks of every river, creek in California
- National Geographic: What is the ARkStorm? California’s worst nightmare, potentially
