Last week in South Lake Tahoe, CA, a group of TV weathermen and women gathered to learn more about mountain weather, climate change and, of course, to ski.

As ACE’s staff scientist, having done research on climate change, I was invited to be a speaker at Operation Sierra Storm, along with Chris Field, a lead author of the 2007 IPCC report, and, coincidentally, my own husband, avalanche forecaster at the Sierra Avalanche Center, Andy Anderson.

The first morning of the conference, we woke up to 5 inches of fresh snow on the ground, making the mountains look beautiful. I was asked to appear, dark and early, at the base of Heavenly Ski Resort, to be interviewed by Lee Solomon, a weather reporter from KSBW in Santa Cruz, CA about the conference and past research I had done on an ice core drilling project in Antarctica. Brrr! I know it was cold in Antarctica, but standing around in the snow, waiting to go on camera at 6:30 in the morning was pretty darn frigid, too.

Later that morning, I attended the keynote lecture by Chris Field of Stanford University. Chris spoke compellingly about the long history of research on climate change, dating back to Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who first wrote about the link between CO₂ (called carbonic acid at the time) and trapping heat in the atmosphere. He also talked about the risk of increased wildfire damage in California and the West, which increases dramatically with warming temperatures.

Thursday afternoon was devoted to skiing (my kind of conference!) and Friday morning I took the stage to a small, but enthusiastic group of National Weather Service forecasters and TV weathercasters from around California and Nevada. My talk was titled “Science from the Poles: What ice and mud can tell us about global warming.” I shared pictures, stories and knowledge gained from my research both in the Arctic, studying melting icecaps on Baffin Island as well as from drilling an ice core in Antarctica. I also got to share some of the amazing student success stories we’ve seen at ACE, including one of my favorite Action Teams, the Reed High Eco Warriors, who won $12,000 to green their school’s bathrooms. So cool!

The highlight of the conference, though, came after my talk, when I gave an interview for KEYT3-TV in Santa Barbara at the top of the tram at Heavenly. What a shame – that meant I had to ski to get to and from my interview! The weatherman and my interviewer, Alan Rose, and I took a couple runs en route to the camera. Not bad. As it goes in TV world, the interview was over 60 seconds after it began, then we skied on down to the bottom.

Thanks for the fun conference, OSS! You can see the interview on KEYT3-TV here.