DRI's 2003 Warden Winner conducting American Monsoon research
The Desert Research Institute has awarded the 2003 Colin Warden Award to graduate research assistant Dorothea Ivanova, a Ph.D. candidate in atmospheric sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. Ivanova’s selection was based on her application of an advanced meteorological model to connect rising sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of California with the onset of the American Monsoon, often the source of summer flash floods in southern Nevada.
Ivanova has been working under the guidance of Dr. David Mitchell, a DRI atmospheric physicist who has been studying the monsoon-sea surface temperature relationship in collaboration with Mexican scientists for about five years. The American Monsoon is responsible for significant summer precipitation in Arizona and New Mexico, and can also influence weather throughout the Intermountain West and into the Great Plains. Massive, widespread range fires across much of the central and eastern Great Basin several years ago were caused by monsoonal lightning storms.
The $1,000 award is named for Colin Warden, a Washoe Medical Center electrician and an ardent environmentalist who died in 1991. His family and friends established the endowment to promote environmental research by graduate students working at DRI or supervised by DRI scientists.
A nonprofit, statewide division of the University and Community College System of Nevada, DRI pursues a full-time program of basic and applied environmental research on a local, national, and international scale. Nearly 500 full- and part-time scientists, technicians, and support staff conduct some 150 research projects at DRI annually. More than 85 percent of DRI's annual $33 million operating budget consists of research grants and contracts obtained by its scientists. The balance is received from the state of Nevada for administrative costs.