The CU Mountain Research Station (MRS) Summer Seminar Series kicked off its 2024 season on June 13, 2024, with a presentation by NOAA Research Meteorologist George Kiladis at the Mountain Research Station (colorado.edu/mrs) south of Ward.

The seminar series will feature eleven speakers with expertise in ecological or environmental topics between June 13 and August 21. The seminars are at 7 p.m. on Wednesday evenings in the Megadon building on the west side of the MRS campus.

The Director of MRS, Scott Taylor, said the summer series had been discontinued during the pandemic but resumed in 2023 and has a full slate of speakers for 2024.

Speakers are selected based on either the research they are involved in at the station, or research through CU they wanted to present. Taylor said that MRS tried to assemble an eclectic group of speakers with a diverse set of topics ranging from weather and water to Tropical versus Temperate alpine plant ecology.

Some have compared the RMS summer seminar series to free TED Talks for environmental geeks.

Kiladis was the first speaker of the series. He gave a slide presentation on climate variability over the Front Range using data collected at the station. The station has been collecting detailed daily weather information since the 1950s at Upper Montane and Tundra locations above the station, which can be compared with Boulder readings and readings from weather balloons sent up by airports.

His charts mapped temperatures and precipitation across the decades and showed fluctuations by season and year. His research models incorporate millions of data points from a variety of sources. He referenced the Gridded Climate site at NOAA (psl.noaa.gov/data/ gridded/index.html) for a wealth of drill-down climate data.

Kiladis ended his presentation by discussing the El Nino and La Nina weather patterns and how they affect Colorado’s weather and precipitation.

The next seminar, on June 26, will feature Katie Rocci speaking on the cycle that reconstructs chemical elements and compounds between living organisms, the atmosphere and the Earth’s crust, and how those cycles are being affected by climate change.

Future seminars will feature Chris Ray from Ward speaking on the future of Pikas, and Jonathan Henn on alpine plant responses to global change.

The public is invited to attend and ask questions. The research station is on Boulder County Road 116. Take the Rainbow Lakes turnoff from Highway 72 and stay right.