Felicia Chiang

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Plain Language Summary Most studies investigating human impacts on climate conditions focus on characterizing changes in individual variables such as precipitation or temperature. However, since many climate conditions are interconnected, these individual variables do not comprehensively represent the many changes that can occur in response to huma...

Most climate change detection and attribution studies have focused on mean or extreme temperature or precipitation, neglecting to explore long-term changes in drought characteristics. Here we provide evidence that anthropogenic forcing has impacted interrelated meteorological drought characteristics. Using SPI and SPEI indices generated from an ens...

Traditional, mainstream definitions of drought describe it as deficit in water‐related variables or water‐dependent activities (e.g., precipitation, soil moisture, surface and groundwater storage, and irrigation) due to natural variabilities that are out of the control of local decision‐makers. Here, we argue that within coupled human‐water systems...

Warming temperatures and severe droughts have contributed to increasing fire activity in California. Decadal average summer temperature in California has increased by 0.8 °C during 1984–2014, while the decadal total size of large fires has expanded by a factor of 2.5. This study proposes a multivariate probabilistic approach for quantifying changes...

Climate extremes threaten human health, economic stability, and the well-being of natural and built environments (e.g., 2003 European heat wave). As the world continues to warm, climate hazards are expected to increase in frequency and intensity. The impacts of extreme events will also be more severe due to the increased exposure (growing populatio...

Atmospheric warming is projected to intensify heat wave events, as quantified by multiple descriptors, including intensity, duration, and frequency. While most studies investigate one feature at a time, heat wave characteristics are often interdependent and ignoring the relationships between them can lead to substantial biases in frequency (hazard)...

Basosquamous carcinoma (BSC) is an aggressive skin neoplasm with the features of both basal cell carcinoma (BCC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). While genetic drivers of BCC and SCC development have been extensively characterized, BSC has not been well studied, and it remains unclear whether these tumors originally derive from BCC or SCC. In add...

This study investigates how hydropower generation under climate change affects the ability of the electric grid to integrate high wind and solar capacities. Using California as an example, water reservoir releases are modeled as a function of hydrologic conditions in the context of a highly-renewable electric grid in the year 2050. The system is pe...

Climate change is expected to significantly reshape hydropower generation in California. However, the impact on the ability of hydropower to provide reserve capacity that can provide on-demand, back-up electricity generation to stabilize the grid in the case of a contingency has not been explored. This study examined the impact of climate change-dr...

In this study, we investigate the extent to which physical water resource availability constraints can limit the deployment of solar thermal and geothermal-based energy resources under future climate scenarios in California. This is accomplished by (1) calculating the water unconstrained potential capacity for solar thermal and geothermal power pla...

Track connections between hurricanes, wildfires, climate change and other risks, urge Amir AghaKouchak and colleagues. Track connections between hurricanes, wildfires, climate change and other risks, urge Amir AghaKouchak and colleagues.

During droughts, low surface moisture may translate surface heating into warming, since excess energy will be converted into sensible heat instead of evaporating as latent heat. Recent concurrent occurrences of droughts and heatwaves have caused compounding ecosystem and societal stresses, which prompted our investigation of whether there has been...

The effects of disruptions to residential and commercial building load characteristics due to climate change and increased electrification of space and water heating systems on the greenhouse gas emissions and resource capacity requirements of the future electric grid in California during the year 2050 compared to present day are investigated. We u...