Daniel Swain

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, studies the physics, dynamics and impacts of the Earth’s changing climate system, with a particular focus on how global warming is affecting the character and causes of regional climate extremes, including the atmospheric phenomena responsible for droughts, floods and wildfires.

His research embraces “climate complexity” by accounting for the nuanced spatial and temporal characteristics of Earth’s response to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Swain has also explored the linkages between different elements of the broader Earth system, and how changing conditions in the tropics and polar regions may be affecting climate in geographically distant regions.

His recent work seeks has focused the changing spatiotemporal character of precipitation, including the rising risk of regional “megafloods” in a warming climate, and the the climate-related factors driving the recent surge in wildfire activity in California.