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MIT announces five flagship projects in first-ever Climate Grand Challenges competition

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MIT today announced the five flagship projects selected in its first-ever Climate Grand Challenges competition. These multiyear projects will define a dynamic research agenda focused on unraveling some of the toughest unsolved climate problems and bringing high-impact, science-based solutions to the world on an accelerated basis.

Representing the most promising concepts to emerge from the two-year competition, the five flagship projects will receive additional funding and resources from MIT and others to develop their ideas and swiftly transform them into practical solutions at scale.

“Climate Grand Challenges represents a whole-of-MIT drive to develop game-changing advances to confront the escalating climate crisis, in time to make a difference,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “We are inspired by the creativity and boldness of the flagship ideas and by their potential to make a significant contribution to the global climate response. But given the planet-wide scale of the challenge, success depends on partnership. We are eager to work with visionary leaders in every sector to accelerate this impact-oriented research, implement serious solutions at scale, and inspire others to join us in confronting this urgent challenge for humankind."

Brief descriptions of the five Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects are provided below.

Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge

This project leverages advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data sciences to improve the accuracy of climate models and make them more useful to a variety of stakeholders — from communities to industry. The team is developing a digital twin of the Earth that harnesses more data than ever before to reduce and quantify uncertainties in climate projections.

Research leads: Raffaele Ferrari , the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and director of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate; and Noelle Eckley Selin , director of the Technology and Policy Program and professor with a joint appointment in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry

This project seeks to reinvent and electrify the processes and materials behind hard-to-decarbonize industries like steel, cement, ammonia, and ethylene production. A new innovation hub will perform targeted fundamental research and engineering with urgency, pushing the technological envelope on electricity-driven chemical transformations.

Research leads: Yet-Ming Chiang , the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Bilge Yıldız , the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Preparing for a new world of weather and climate extremes

This project addresses key gaps in knowledge about intensifying extreme events such as floods, hurricanes, and heat waves, and quantifies their long-term risk in a changing climate. The team is developing a scalable climate-change adaptation toolkit to help vulnerable communities and low-carbon energy providers prepare for these extreme weather events.

Research leads: Kerry Emanuel , the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and co-director of the MIT Lorenz Center; Miho Mazereeuw , associate professor of architecture and urbanism in the Department of Architecture and director of the Urban Risk Lab; and Paul O’Gorman , professor in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

The C limate Resilience Early Warning System

The CREWSnet project seeks to reinvent climate change adaptation with a novel forecasting system that empowers underserved communities to interpret local climate risk, proactively plan for their futures incorporating resilience strategies, and minimize losses. CREWSnet will initially be demonstrated in southwestern Bangladesh, serving as a model for similarly threatened regions around the world.

Research leads: John Aldridge , assistant leader of the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Elfatih Eltahir , the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Revolutionizing agriculture with low-emissions, resilient crops

This project works to revolutionize the agricultural sector with climate-resilient crops and fertilizers that have the ability to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food production.

Research lead: Christopher Voigt , the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering

“As one of the world’s leading institutions of research and innovation, it is incumbent upon MIT to draw on our depth of knowledge, ingenuity, and ambition to tackle the hard climate problems now confronting the world,” says Richard Lester, MIT associate provost for international activities. “Together with collaborators across industry, finance, community, and government, the Climate Grand Challenges teams are looking to develop and implement high-impact, path-breaking climate solutions rapidly and at a grand scale.”

The initial call for ideas in 2020 yielded nearly 100 letters of interest from almost 400 faculty members and senior researchers, representing 90 percent of MIT departments. After an extensive evaluation, 27 finalist teams received a total of $2.7 million to develop comprehensive research and innovation plans. The projects address four broad research themes:

• Building equity and fairness into climate solutions
• Decarbonizing complex industries and processes
• Removing, managing, and storing greenhouse gases
• Using data and science to forecast climate-related risk

To select the winning projects, research plans were reviewed by panels of international experts representing relevant scientific and technical domains as well as experts in processes and policies for innovation and scalability.

“In response to climate change, the world really needs to do two things quickly: deploy the solutions we already have much more widely, and develop new solutions that are urgently needed to tackle this intensifying threat,” says Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research. “These five flagship projects exemplify MIT’s strong determination to bring its knowledge and expertise to bear in generating new ideas and solutions that will help solve the climate problem.”

“The Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects set a new standard for inclusive climate solutions that can be adapted and implemented across the globe,” says MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles. “This competition propels the entire MIT research community — faculty, students, postdocs, and staff — to act with urgency around a worsening climate crisis, and I look forward to seeing the difference these projects can make.”

“MIT’s efforts on climate research amid the climate crisis was a primary reason that I chose to attend MIT, and remains a reason that I view the Institute favorably. MIT has a clear opportunity to be a thought leader in the climate space in our own MIT way, which is why CGC fits in so well,” says senior Megan Xu, who served on the Climate Grand Challenges student committee and is studying ways to make the food system more sustainable.

The Climate Grand Challenges competition is a key initiative of “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” which the Institute published in May 2021. Fast Forward outlines MIT’s comprehensive plan for helping the world address the climate crisis. It consists of five broad areas of action: sparking innovation, educating future generations, informing and leveraging government action, reducing MIT’s own climate impact, and uniting and coordinating all of MIT’s climate efforts.

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Associate Provost Richard Lester and Prof. Noelle Selin speak with Tiziana Dearing, host of Radio Boston , about MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges. “To me, the Climate Grand Challenges effort really represents that we’re kind of at a frameshift when thinking about the climate problem. It’s not just a problem that some people can work on,” says Selin. “A climate challenge is a whole of society challenge, and therefore it really has to be a whole of MIT challenge.” Lester adds he hopes the challenges will “inspire a new generation of students to roll up their sleeves, put their shoulders to the wheel and help us solve this problem.”

Boston Business Journal

MIT announced five projects "targeting the world's toughest climate riddles" that were selected following a rigorous two-year competition, reports Benjamin Kail for Boston Business Journal . “Climate Grand Challenges represents a whole-of-MIT drive to develop game-changing advances to confront the escalating climate crisis, in time to make a difference,” says President L. Rafael Reif.

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Institute for a Sustainable Future

Climate & Weather

Faculty across many departments at Purdue pursue research on issues of climate change and weather impacts in a myriad of ways; some key topics this research community pursues include:

• Heat stress and weather impacts;
• Climate change and biodiversity;
• Climate and public health;
• Climate smart agriculture;
• Climate action and environmental justice

Lead: Lei Wang (EAPS)

Climate Change Impact Assessments

Scientists and decision makers from across the state have worked together to develop a series of easily understandable reports that show how a changing climate will affect state and local interests. Led by Purdue’s Climate Change Research Center (now part of Purdue’s Institute for a Sustainable Future), the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA) provide the scientific research to help Hoosiers understand and prepare for the impacts of a changing climate.

Click here to view past Indiana Climate Change Impact Assessments.

Current Team Projects

Combining self-organized maps and idealized storm-scale simulations to investigate the effect of future climate change on severe convective storms.

PI: Dan Chavas ;  Co-PI: Dan Dawson;  Funding: NSF

The team is using data-based methods to examine how the environments that typically generate severe thunderstorms may change in climate model simulations. They will then test the effect of these changes on severe thunderstorms and tornadoes in simulations using a storm model. The results of both steps can be combined together to examine how severe thunderstorms may change in the future, which will help society better plan and adapt.

Ecological Tradeoffs in Water Quality and Climate Regulation in Restored Wetlands in Agricultural Landscapes

PI: Jake Hosen (ABE);  Co-PIs: Sara McMillan (ABE/EEE), Laura Bowling (AGRO);   Funding: USDA-NIFA

The team is developing a mechanistic understanding of the water quality function of agricultural wetlands and environmental regulation of other ecosystem services (ie, water for irrigation) and disservices (ie, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that drive climate change). 

A data-centric uncertainty-informed framework for resilience analytics of critical infrastructure under extreme climate events

PI: Roshi Nateghi (Ind Eng);  Co-PI: Dan Chavas (Ind Eng);  Funding: NSF

The team is working to advance the theory and practice of resilience engineering through establishing a pluralistic, data-centric and uncertainty-informed framework to efficiently characterize multi-dimensional infrastructure resilience under stochastic hazards as well as plausible infrastructure evolution (due to adaptation or mitigation strategies) and climate change scenarios.

Heat Tolerant Maize for Asia

PI: Mitch Tuinstra (AGRO);  Co-PIs: Melba Crawford (Civil); Ayman Habib (Civil);  Funding: USAID

Growing heat-tolerant maize can reduce yield losses due to climate change by up to 36% (rainfed) and 93% (irrigated). Heat Tolerant Maize for Asia (HTMA, 2013-17) helped smallholder farmers in climate-vulnerable ecologies to secure their food security and livelihoods, ensured technologies' equal access to women farmers and incorporated gender-preferred nutrition traits. 50+ CIMMYT maize hybrids have been licensed to public and private partners (2015-2020) for release. By 2020, farmers had adopted 16 varieties on over 20,000 ha.

Seed Grants

The following seed grants were given to multiple Purdue faculty in fall 2021 to help initiate new climate-related projects in areas ranging from diseases in wild animals and domestic livestock to smoke taint in wine. Read below for more on their exciting new projects.

Assessing the role of climate in the re-emergence of hemorrhagic septicemia in wild animals and domestic livestock

PIs:   Wendy Beauvais   (VetMed);  Lei Wang   (EAPS)

This project's long-term aim is to determine the precise drivers of Hemorrhagic septicemia (HS) outbreaks and to predict the potential impacts of future climate scenarios.

Downscaling and visualizing climate change scenarios to advance environmental justice and promote local action

PI:  Yiwei Huang   (HortLA);   Co-PIs: Tian Guo (Research Scientist, ABE); Keith Cherkauer  (ABE, EEE); Venkatesh Merwade (Civil Eng)

This project will lay the foundation for the selection of appropriate visualization methods when communicating climate change to different stakeholders that can be utilized by all associated disciplines who work together to win local buy-in.

Capturing diagenetic production of hydrocarbons in sediments towards carbon-neutral production of drop-in gasoline replacements

PI:  Steve Lindemann   (Food Sci);   Co-PI:  Lisa Welp (EAPS)

Current biofuels approaches are typically limited to production of ethanol using yeast or recombinant bacteria. This project looks to nature for a potential solution by testing the hypothesis that the microbial mat of Hot Lake, a heliothermal lake in northern Washington, is diagenetically converted into hydrocarbons when interred in sediment.

Incorporating Community Agency in Reducing Uncontrolled Wildfires (ICARUS)

PIs:  Zhao Ma  (FNR);  Jonathan Bauchet  (AgEcon, HTM);  Ricardo Godoy   (Brandeis University)

This project seeks to address knowledge gaps in causes and prevention of wildfires in Bolivia via a pilot research project.

Andean vulcanism induced albedo as the cause and termination of the Little Ice Age

PIs:  Greg Michalski  (EAPS, Chem);  Matt Huber  (EAPS);  H. Kory Cooper  (ANTH);  Cliff Johnston   (AGRY);  Chad Jafvert   (Civil Eng);  Lisa Welp   (EAPS)

This project proposes a new hypothesis to explain global cooling that occurred between roughly 1500-1850, a period referred to as the Little Ice Age (LIA).

Understanding and Predicting the Tropical-Extratropical Relaying Pathways to Arctic Amplification

PI:  Di Qi   (MATH);   Co-PIs:  James Garrison   (Aero/Astro, ECE); Wen-Wen Tung   (EAPS); Lei Wang   (EAPS)

This proposal aims to resolve, from the fundamental level, significant obstacles to understanding and predictions of the pathways to Arctic Amplification through tropical-extratropical interactions.

Bioremediation of Smoke Taint in Wine by Engineered Yeast

PIs:  Tor N. Tolhurst   (Ag Econ);  Christian E. Butzke   (Food Sci);  Eun Joong Oh   (Food Sci)

For the proposed project the team will create technology for the wine industry to adapt to climate-change related wildfires: engineered yeast to biologically remediate undesirable smoke-taint compounds in wine.

Quantifying snowpack decline in the Colorado River headwaters beyond the instrumental record using cosmogenic nuclides

PIs:  Marissa Tremblay   (EAPS);  Keith Cherkauer  (ABE, EEE);  Nathaniel Lifton   (EAPS)

The Colorado River supplies water to >40 million people and is used to irrigate 5.5 million acres of land in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. In this project the team will use cosmogenic helium paleothermometry (CHP) to document the onset of snowpack loss at two pilot field sites in the Rocky Mountains of north-central Colorado.

Transforming Attitudes into Climate-Smart Action in Agriculture-Travel

PIs:  Stacey Connaughton   (Comm, PPRI);  Kayla Joy Gerdes  (Ph.D. Candidate, Comm);  Sylvie M. Brouder   (AGRY);  Jeffrey J. Volenec   (AGRY)

This project will use preliminary results from the survey to develop and launch a more thorough assessment of scientific and practitioner knowledge of the interactions between climate change and agriculture.

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How do we improve the skill with which models’ make predictions? JPL is leading a project for NASA that will bring satellite observations into a format that will make them easy to compare with climate models.

Climate News

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

• While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history , the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years.
• According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ), "Since systematic scientific assessments began in the 1970s, the influence of human activity on the warming of the climate system has evolved from theory to established fact." 1
• Scientific information taken from natural sources (such as ice cores, rocks, and tree rings) and from modern equipment (like satellites and instruments) all show the signs of a changing climate.
• From global temperature rise to melting ice sheets, the evidence of a warming planet abounds.

The rate of change since the mid-20th century is unprecedented over millennia.

Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 800,000 years, there have been eight cycles of ice ages and warmer periods, with the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

The current warming trend is different because it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s, and is proceeding at a rate not seen over many recent millennia. 1 It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.

Earth-orbiting satellites and new technologies have helped scientists see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate all over the world. These data, collected over many years, reveal the signs and patterns of a changing climate.

Scientists demonstrated the heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases in the mid-19th century. 2 Many of the science instruments NASA uses to study our climate focus on how these gases affect the movement of infrared radiation through the atmosphere. From the measured impacts of increases in these gases, there is no question that increased greenhouse gas levels warm Earth in response.

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly 10 times faster than the average rate of warming after an ice age. Carbon dioxide from human activities is increasing about 250 times faster than it did from natural sources after the last Ice Age. 3

The Evidence for Rapid Climate Change Is Compelling:

Global Temperature Is Rising

The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere and other human activities. 4 Most of the warming occurred in the past 40 years, with the seven most recent years being the warmest. The years 2016 and 2020 are tied for the warmest year on record. 5 Image credit: Ashwin Kumar, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

The Ocean Is Getting Warmer

The ocean has absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 100 meters (about 328 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.67 degrees Fahrenheit (0.33 degrees Celsius) since 1969. 6 Earth stores 90% of the extra energy in the ocean. Image credit: Kelsey Roberts/USGS

The Ice Sheets Are Shrinking

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost an average of 279 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2019, while Antarctica lost about 148 billion tons of ice per year. 7 Image: The Antarctic Peninsula, Credit: NASA

Glaciers Are Retreating

Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska, and Africa. 8 Image: Miles Glacier, Alaska Image credit: NASA

Snow Cover Is Decreasing

Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and the snow is melting earlier. 9 Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sea Level Is Rising

Global sea level rose about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the last century. The rate in the last two decades, however, is nearly double that of the last century and accelerating slightly every year. 10 Image credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Norfolk District

Arctic Sea Ice Is Declining

Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades. 11 Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Extreme Events Are Increasing in Frequency

The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events. 12 Image credit: Régine Fabri,  CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Ocean Acidification Is Increasing

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30%. 13 , 14 This increase is due to humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the ocean. The ocean has absorbed between 20% and 30% of total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in recent decades (7.2 to 10.8 billion metric tons per year). 1 5 , 16 Image credit: NOAA

1. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, WGI, Technical Summary . B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere.” Nature 382 (04 July 1996): 39-46. https://doi.org/10.1038/382039a0. Gabriele C. Hegerl et al., “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method.” Journal of Climate 9 (October 1996): 2281-2306. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(1996)009<2281:DGGICC>2.0.CO;2. V. Ramaswamy, et al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling.” Science 311 (24 February 2006): 1138-1141. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1122587. B.D. Santer et al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes.” Science 301 (25 July 2003): 479-483. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1084123. T. Westerhold et al., "An astronomically dated record of Earth’s climate and its predictability over the last 66 million years." Science 369 (11 Sept. 2020): 1383-1387. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1094123

2. In 1824, Joseph Fourier calculated that an Earth-sized planet, at our distance from the Sun, ought to be much colder. He suggested something in the atmosphere must be acting like an insulating blanket. In 1856, Eunice Foote discovered that blanket, showing that carbon dioxide and water vapor in Earth's atmosphere trap escaping infrared (heat) radiation. In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming. In 1941, Milutin Milankovic linked ice ages to Earth’s orbital characteristics. Gilbert Plass formulated the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change in 1956.

3. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, WG1, Chapter 2 Vostok ice core data; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record O. Gaffney, W. Steffen, "The Anthropocene Equation." The Anthropocene Review 4, issue 1 (April 2017): 53-61. https://doi.org/abs/10.1177/2053019616688022.

4. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/monitoring https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

5. https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20170118/

6. S. Levitus, J. Antonov, T. Boyer, O Baranova, H. Garcia, R. Locarnini, A. Mishonov, J. Reagan, D. Seidov, E. Yarosh, M. Zweng, " NCEI ocean heat content, temperature anomalies, salinity anomalies, thermosteric sea level anomalies, halosteric sea level anomalies, and total steric sea level anomalies from 1955 to present calculated from in situ oceanographic subsurface profile data (NCEI Accession 0164586), Version 4.4. (2017) NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index3.html K. von Schuckmann, L. Cheng, L,. D. Palmer, J. Hansen, C. Tassone, V. Aich, S. Adusumilli, H. Beltrami, H., T. Boyer, F. Cuesta-Valero, D. Desbruyeres, C. Domingues, A. Garcia-Garcia, P. Gentine, J. Gilson, M. Gorfer, L. Haimberger, M. Ishii, M., G. Johnson, R. Killick, B. King, G. Kirchengast, N. Kolodziejczyk, J. Lyman, B. Marzeion, M. Mayer, M. Monier, D. Monselesan, S. Purkey, D. Roemmich, A. Schweiger, S. Seneviratne, A. Shepherd, D. Slater, A. Steiner, F. Straneo, M.L. Timmermans, S. Wijffels. "Heat stored in the Earth system: where does the energy go?" Earth System Science Data 12, Issue 3 (07 September 2020): 2013-2041. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-2013-2020.

7. I. Velicogna, Yara Mohajerani, A. Geruo, F. Landerer, J. Mouginot, B. Noel, E. Rignot, T. Sutterly, M. van den Broeke, M. Wessem, D. Wiese, "Continuity of Ice Sheet Mass Loss in Greenland and Antarctica From the GRACE and GRACE Follow-On Missions." Geophysical Research Letters 47, Issue 8 (28 April 2020): e2020GL087291. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL087291.

8. National Snow and Ice Data Center World Glacier Monitoring Service

9. National Snow and Ice Data Center D.A. Robinson, D. K. Hall, and T. L. Mote, "MEaSUREs Northern Hemisphere Terrestrial Snow Cover Extent Daily 25km EASE-Grid 2.0, Version 1 (2017). Boulder, Colorado USA. NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. doi: https://doi.org/10.5067/MEASURES/CRYOSPHERE/nsidc-0530.001 . http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/snow_extent.html Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. Data History

10. R.S. Nerem, B.D. Beckley, J. T. Fasullo, B.D. Hamlington, D. Masters, and G.T. Mitchum, "Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era." PNAS 15, no. 9 (12 Feb. 2018): 2022-2025. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1717312115.

11. https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/sea_ice.html Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS, Zhang and Rothrock, 2003) http://psc.apl.washington.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/ http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/projections-of-an-ice-diminished-arctic-ocean/

12. USGCRP, 2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, https://doi.org/10.7930/j0j964j6 .

13. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F

14. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification

15. C.L. Sabine, et al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2.” Science 305 (16 July 2004): 367-371. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1097403.

16. Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate , Technical Summary, Chapter TS.5, Changing Ocean, Marine Ecosystems, and Dependent Communities, Section 5.2.2.3. https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/technical-summary/

Header image shows clouds imitating mountains as the sun sets after midnight as seen from Denali's backcountry Unit 13 on June 14, 2019. Credit: NPS/Emily Mesner Image credit in list of evidence: Ashwin Kumar, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

Climate change science

Climate action research, funding, collaboration, projects and results, publications, news and events

EU support for research and innovation on climate change science

Climate change is one of the most challenging problems facing society.

EU and international research have significantly furthered our understanding of the causes of climate change and our response options, both mitigation and adaptation related. Today’s pressing challenge is to acceleration their implementation and uptake.

To limit warming to 1.5°C, immediate and drastic emissions reductions across all sectors and parts of the society are needed and this decade will be decisive. We need to act now and use every tool and solution at our disposal – not only technological, but also nature-based and societal.

Research and innovation will play a crucial role in these efforts and the EU will continue to be a leading force as a key funder of world class climate science that delivers the framework for socio-ecological transformation envisioned in the European Green Deal.

Current research and innovation activities focus on

• Earth system science
• climate resilience and adaptation to climate change
• climate change mitigation pathways
• polar and ocean research
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

In the EU's research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe (2021-2027), the EU Mission Adaptation to Climate Change , will foster the development and uptake of innovative solutions to adapt to climate change and encourage regions, cities and communities to lead the societal transformation.

Related research and innovation areas

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By helping us understand how the climate system works and how it will change over time, climate science is fundamental for making informed and wise decisions about reducing emissions and adapting to a changing climate.

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Multi-stakeholder forum on science, technology and innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals in which the Commission actively participates.

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Platform for sharing data and information to inform decision making on climate adaptation

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• 18 March 2024

EU Research & Innovation Week: Commission opens flagship event to shape the future of research and innovation

Research and innovation news alert: The first day features the opening ceremony at 14:00 CET, a journey through the 40-year-old history of the EU R&I framework programme and discussions about its future, and culminates with the announcement of the Women Innovators Prize Ceremony at 17:00 CET.

• 4 March 2024

New report: Research and Innovation for Climate Neutrality by 2050: Challenges, opportunities and the path forward

The aim of the report is to provide policy recommendations regarding the design, principles and solution landscapes needed for a long-term, forward-looking R&I agenda to accelerate the transition to net-zero emissions.

• 1 March 2024

EU Climate & Health conference: Researchers, policymakers and funders gear up and prepare for a bold and inclusive research and innovation agenda

European Commission has launched the preparations for the new Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) on climate and health, after collecting large amounts of input from all the participating experts, through a total of 4 plenary sessions and 12 side sessions.

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• Live streaming available

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Researching Climate Change

Climate change research involves numerous disciplines of Earth system science as well as technology, engineering, and programming. Some major areas of climate change research include water, energy, ecosystems, air quality, solar physics, glaciology, human health, wildfires, and land use.

To have a complete picture of how the climate changes and how these changes affect the Earth, scientists make direct measurements of climate using weather instruments. They also look at proxy data that gives us clues about climate conditions from prehistoric times. And they use models of the Earth system to predict how the climate will change in the future.

Measurements of modern climate change

Because climate describes the weather conditions averaged over a long period of time (typically 30 years), much of the same information gathered about weather is used to research climate. Temperature is measured every day at thousands of locations around the world. This data is used to calculate average global temperatures . Changes in temperature patterns are a strong indicator of how much the climate is changing. Because we have thousands of temperature measurements, we know that record high temperatures are increasing across the globe, which is a sign that the climate is warming. Climatologists also look at changes in precipitation, the length and frequency of drought, as well as the number of days that rivers are at flood stage to understand how the climate is changing. Winds and other direct measures of climate contribute to climate change research as well.

This map shows the location of weather stations across the Earth. Continuous data from thousands of stations is important for climate change research.

Using proxy data to understand climate change in the past

Throughout Earth's 4.6 billion years, the climate has changed drastically, including periods that were much colder and much warmer than the climate today. But how do we know about the climate from prehistoric times ? Researchers decipher clues within the Earth to help reconstruct past environments based on our understanding of environments today. Proxy data can take the form of fossils, sediment layers, tree rings , coral, and ice cores. These proxies contain evidence of past environments. For example, marine fossils and ocean seafloor sediment preserved in rock layers from around 80 million years ago (the Cretaceous Period) indicate that North America was mostly covered in water. The high sea levels were due to a much warmer climate when all of the polar ice sheets had melted. We also find fossil vegetation and pollen records indicating that forests covered the polar regions during this same time period. The existence of multiple types of proxy data from different locations, often from overlapping time periods, strengthens our understanding of past climates.

Ice core drilling in the Arctic provides proxy evidence of paleoclimate conditions.

National Snow and Ice Data Center

Using models to project future climate change

Scientists use models of the Earth to figure out how climate will likely change in the future. These models, which are simulations of Earth, include equations that describe everything from how the winds blow to how sea ice reflects sunlight and how forests take up carbon dioxide. In-depth knowledge of how each part of the Earth functions is needed to write the equations that represent each part within the model. Understanding climate change in both the present and the past helps to create computational models that can predict how the climate system might change in the future.

While scientists work hard to ensure that climate models are as accurate as possible, the models are unable to predict exactly how the climate will change in the future because some things are unknown, namely how much humans will change (or not change) behaviors that contribute to climate warming. Scientists run the models with different scenarios to account for a range of possibilities. For example, running the models to show how the climate will respond if we reduce fossil fuel emissions by different amounts can help us prepare for the many impacts that a changing climate has on the Earth.

Climate models keep track of how parameters change from place to place using a grid pattern on the Earth’s surface. The environmental conditions within each hexagon-shaped area are programmed into the model. More detailed models have smaller hexagons.

Studying the impacts of climate change

From monitoring changes in tropical coral reefs to changes in glacial ice, keeping track of how climate change is affecting the planet is important for adapting to the future. Scientists who monitor the environment report stronger and more frequent storms, changing weather patterns, a longer growing season in some locations, and changes in the distribution of plants and migratory animals. Monitoring how climate change is affecting our world can help identify new threats to human health as the ranges of insect-borne diseases change and as drought-prone regions expand.

Many different areas of research, from meteorology to oceanography, epidemiology to agriculture, and even fields such as sociology and economics, have a role to play in terms of researching both how the climate is changing and the impacts of climate change.

The average length of the growing season in the lower 48 states has increased by almost two weeks since the late 1800s, a result of the changing climate. Researchers study how this change in the growing season impacts humans and the Earth. Credit: EPA

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Grand Challenge

Climate Science for Change

MIT scientists have pioneered efforts to understand the essential dynamics of global climate change and its effects across land, atmosphere, oceans, and ice sheets.

The climate crisis affects everyone. And in many parts of the world, those who are least equipped to handle their changing environment will be disproportionately impacted by it. Much can and must be achieved with existing technologies and policy approaches, including at MIT. In "Fast Forward: MIT's Climate Action Plan for the Decade," the Institute redoubles its bedrock commitment to expand humankind’s knowledge of the forces disrupting the climate.

With foundational scientific research and game-changing innovations, we can continue to address the grand challenge of climate change. Through MIT's Climate Grand Challenges, five flagship projects have been selected to help us fast forward to the future we want — and need — to see.

Ocean vital signs

How much carbon can the ocean absorb and how much more it can take?

Researchers propose launching a fleet of oceangoing drones that would continuously monitor the flux of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and ocean, helping to inform next-generation visualizations and models of the global carbon cycle.

Predicting sea-level rise

Can we predict sea-level rise from the physics of ice sheets?

Brent Minchew, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), wants to more fully understand the most fundamental processes that govern rapid changes in glacial ice, and to use that understanding to build next-generation models that are more predictive of ice sheet behavior as they respond to, and influence, climate change.

Quote from Matěj Peč geoscientist and the Victor P. Starr Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS)

“If we want to be anywhere near those limits of 1.5 or 2C, then we have to be carbon neutral by 2050, and then carbon negative after that."

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A mineral produced by plate tectonics has a global cooling effect, study finds.

November 30, 2023

Explained: The 1.5 C climate benchmark

August 27, 2023

MIT scientists measure river flow rates on Mars and Titan, Saturn's largest moon

August 8, 2023

Climate change is changing the ocean's color

July 21, 2023

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Australia’s massive wildfires shredded the ozone layer — now scientists know why

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January 11, 2023

MIT is creating a digital twin of the Earth to help model climate change

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MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium announces recipients of inaugural MCSC Seed Awards

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Q&A: Climate Grand Challenges finalists on using data and science to forecast climate-related risk

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Q&A: Climate Grand Challenges finalists on accelerating reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions

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Q&A: Climate Grand Challenges finalists on building equity and fairness into climate solutions

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Editing Ourselves

With the CRISPR system, researchers can diagnose, detect, and potentially treat a host of diseases within the body using gene editing.

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National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Goddard institute for space studies, goddard space flight center sciences and exploration directorate earth sciences division, climate change research initiative.

NASA Science Mission Directorate’s Climate Change Research Initiative (CCRI) program is an interdisciplinary, collaborative, year-long STEM engagement, and experiential learning opportunity for educators and graduate students to work directly with NASA scientists and lead research teams in a NASA research project hosted at either NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, CUNY City College of Technology in New York City, NY, or NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. The summer component of each CCRI project also includes undergraduate and high school interns.

During the fall and spring terms of CCRI, the research team will consist of NASA Principal Investigators who lead in-service high school STEM educators and graduate student research assistants to become immersed in a NASA science research area related to climate change.

Educators participating in this opportunity become associate researchers, CCRI education ambassadors and STEM education experts who integrate NASA education resources, platforms, data and content into their classrooms while improving STEM education within their communities.

Participating high school STEM educators contribute to the research project, assist in the development of a research question and assist in guiding the research team to complete all program deliverables. Educators also develop an Applied Research STEM Curriculum portfolio and unit plan that utilizes NASA education resources aligning NASA Science and STEM curricula to the Next Generation Science Standards. The teachers will then incorporate the STEM curriculum into their classrooms and also provide community STEM engagement events related to their NASA research study. The fall and spring term will not conflict with the educators' primary schedule, roles or responsibilities at their school sites.

For graduate student research assistants, this opportunity will not conflict with class schedules during the fall and spring. It is considered to be a part-time position that supports the graduate student's major area of study.

During the summer session, the primary research team will add an undergraduate intern and high school intern to the CCRI research team. The entire team will work collaboratively on a full-time basis to complete the research project, deliver presentations, create a scientific poster and a publishable research paper that will be presented at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and other science conferences and symposiums. The final symposium may have participants from other government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States Department of Education (USDE) and the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and many others.

CCRI Autumn 2023-Summer 2024

Research opportunities for educators, grad student assistants, and interns during Autumn 2023 through Summer 2024 include the following projects:

• Deciphering Changing Probabilities of Extreme Climate Events in Climate Models and Measurements (GISS)
• Climate Change in the Hudson Estuary — Past, Present, and Future (GISS/LDEO)
• Monitoring and Studying Lakes from Space in a Changing Climate (GISS/CUNY)
• Characterizing the Urban Land Surface Temperature via an Innovative, Multi-Platformed Suite of Satellite and Ground-Based Remote Sensing Technologies (GISS/CUNY)
• Land Surface Temperature via Satellite and Remote Sensing Technologies (GSFC)
• SnowEx and Understanding the Role of Snow and Measurements (GSFC)

Detailed descriptions of the these projections are available here (PDF).

Education Award Stipend

Program schedule.

• Fall: 10/16/2023-12/22/2023: (~5-10 hr/wk for 10 weeks)
• Spring: 01/29/2024–04/26/2024: (~5-10 hr/wk for 10 weeks)
• Summer: 06/17/2024-08/09/2024: (~40 hr/wk for6-8 weeks)

How to Apply

CCRI applicants must be US citizens . Housing, relocation and travel expenses are not provided. Teachers, graduate students and interns whose locality is regional to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, NY, or NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, are encouraged to apply. Applications are considered upon receipt.

The deadline for educators and graduate students to apply for the CCRI 2023-2024 year-long program was Aug. 25, 2023 .

The final application deadline for Summer 2024 CCRI high school and undergraduate internship opportunities was Feb. 2, 2024 at the NASA Internship Programs website.

Preliminary information about opportunities during the Autumn 2024-Summer 2025 CCRI year will be posted in Summer 2024.

Please address all questions regarding CCRI educator and student opportunities to Matthew Pearce .

Additional Requirements

Upon submission of your application please e-mail Matthew Pearce to confirm receipt of your application.

Educators: Teachers applying for CCRI should submit a cover letter, resume, and unofficial transcripts. Teachers are also encouraged but not required to submit any additional portfolio exemplars. The cover letter should also include:

• A description of how participating in CCRI will benefit your students, school and community.
• Description of IT and programing skills indicating a self-proficiency ranking.
• Rank in order of preference the projects that the teacher would like to apply to and be considered for.

The selected candidate will be requested to provide a letter of support from their school administration for participation and collaboration in the program.

Graduate Students: Graduate Student Research Assistants applying for CCRI should submit a cover letter, resume and unofficial transcripts. The cover letter should also include:

• A description of how participating in CCRI aligns with your current degree program and anticipated graduation date.
• Description of IT and program skills indicating a self-proficiency ranking.
• Rank in order of preference the projects that the graduate student would like to apply to and be considered for.

The selected candidate will be requested to provide a letter of support from their graduate school advisor for participation and collaboration in the program.

How to Submit: Teachers and graduate students should submit their cover letter and application materials via our Box Account .

Other Internships NASA/GISS internship opportunities for high school and college students that are not part of the CCRI program are posted on our general internships info page .

Further Info

Note: PDF documents require the free Adobe Reader or compatible viewing software to be viewed.

Please address all inquiries about the GISS Climate Change Research Initiative to:

Matthew Pearce NASA Office of STEM Engagement Goddard Institute for Space Studies 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025 [email protected] 1 (646) 419-0144

CCRI Education Products

Dulaney, N., 2018: Earth's Energy Budgets . Applied Research STEM Curriculum Unit Portfolio. (16.8 MB PDF)

Dulaney, N., 2019: Future Temperature Projections . Applied Research STEM Curriculum Unit Portfolio. (7.3 MB PDF)

Dulaney, N., 2021: Changes in Climate and Wildfires . Applied Research STEM Curriculum Unit Portfolio. (5.0 MB PDF)

Mundo, A., 2021: Urban Surface Temperatures and the Urban Heat Island Effects . Applied Research STEM Curriculum Unit Portfolio. (9.2 MB PDF)

Sebastian, E., C., 2020: The Heat is On: Urban Heat Islands, Detection Strategies, and Mitigation Solutions . Applied Research STEM Curriculum Unit Portfolio. (5.1 MB PDF)

Wang-Mondaca, C., 2019: Wetlands . Applied Research STEM Curriculum Unit Portfolio. (7.9 MB PDF)

Wang-Mondaca, C., 2021: Blue Carbon: Bringing Field Research and ArcGIS Mapping to the High School Classroom . Applied Research STEM Curriculum Unit Portfolio. (2.6 MB PDF)

CCRI Research Products

Chui, A.C., A. Gittelson, E. Sebastian, N. Stamler, and S. Gaffin, 2018: Urban heat islands and cooler infrastructure — Measuring near-surface temperatures with hand-held infrared cameras . Urban Clim. , 24 , 51-62, doi:10.1016/j.uclim.2017.12.009.

Copple, S.P., D.M. Peteet, D. Balk, C. Chang, B. Jones, and M. Tzortziou, 2023: Marsh archive reveals human population history and future implications for estuarine health in Long Island Sound . Sci. Total Environ. , 895, 164885, doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.164885.

Jakubowski, H.V., N. Bock, L. Busta, M. Pearce, R.L. Roston, Z.D. Shomo, and C.R. Terrell, 2021: Introducing climate change into the biochemistry and molecular biology curriculum . Biochem. Mol. Biol. Educ. , 49 , no. 2, 167-188, doi:10.1002/bmb.21422.

McConnell, K., C. Braneon, E. Glenn, N. Stamler, E. Mallen, D.P. John, R. Pandya, J. Abramowitz, G. Fernandez, and C. Rosenzweig, 2022: A quasi-experimental approach for evaluating the heat mitigation effects of green roofs in Chicago, Illinois . Sustain. Cities Soc. , 76 , 103376, doi:10.1016/j.scs.2021.103376.

Pace, G., D. Peteet, M. Dunton, C. Wang-Mondaca, S. Ismail, J. Supino, and J. Nichols, 2021: Importance of quantifying the full-depth carbon reservoir of Jamaica Bay Salt Marshes, New York . City Environ. Interact. , 12 , 100073, doi:10.1016/j.cacint.2021.100073.

Peteet, D.M., J. Nichols, T. Kenna, C. Chang, J. Browne, M. Reza, S. Kovari, L. Liberman, and S. Stern-Protz, 2018: Sediment starvation destroys New York City marshes' resistance to sea level rise . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA , 115 , no. 41, 10281-10286, doi:10.1073/pnas.1715392115.

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Rate the lesson plan, lesson plan, exploring climate science: research projects.

Devils Postpile National Monument

In “Exploring Climate Science (Research Projects),” students showcase what they learned throughout the unit by completing a final project based on climate change. Students will be able to create a hypothetical research proposal that examines the potential impacts of climate change on the local community.

Water is essential for life on Earth. Relative water availability is a major factor in designating habitats for different living organisms. In the United States, things like agriculture and water rights are hot topics. Current models predict that average global temperatures are going to continue to rise even if regional climate changes remain complex and varied. These changes will have an impact on all of Earth's systems.

Studies have shown that climate change is driven not only by natural effects but also by human activities. Knowledge of the factors that affect climate, coupled with responsible management of natural resources are required for sustaining these Earth systems. Long-term change can be anticipated using science-based predictive models making science and engineering essential to understanding global climate change and its possible impacts.

National Parks can serve as benchmarks for climate science trends and effects over time because they are protected areas void of human influence. Understanding current climate trends will help set students up to be successful in interpreting and engaging in discussions about climate change, which will lead to informed decision making.

* Depending on how deeply you would like to explore the activities of the lesson, this lesson could take anywhere between one and three 40 minute lessons. For example on day one, you could explain the project and students could begin work. On day two, students could continue preparing their work and then begin working on their presentations, and on day three students could finish their presentations and share with the class. Conversely, you could do a quick introduction, give students 30 minutes to prepare their grant proposals and then have a quick whip around, share-out, thereby concluding the lesson in a day. The times below are based on one 45 minute lesson.

Preparation

Teachers will need access to the internet, a computer, and a projector for displaying the videos for the class.

Write the following questions on the board or projector so the all students can see them:

How have climate changes influenced human activities? How could Mammoth Lakes(or your community) be affected if the climate continues to change?

Prepare the following videos:

A Way Forward: Facing Climate Change

California Department of Water Resources: Snow Surveying (.wmv file)

Explains the sections of the grant proposal and how each proposal will be evaluated.

Download Worksheet 8.1: Grant Proposal Rubric

This worksheet will explain how to write the proposals and what should be included. Includes a sample proposal.

Download Worksheet 8.2: Climate Science Project Instructions

Students can use this worksheet to write their proposals.

Download Worksheet 8.3: Proposal Worksheet

Provides teachers with an opportunity to provide lesson plan feedback.

Download Teacher Unit Evaluation

Provides students with an opportunity to provide lesson plan feedback and assess what they’ve learned.

Download Student Unit Evaluation

Optional visual to help students understand the concept of scarce funding.

Download Fake Money

Lesson Hook/Preview

Explain to students that they will be thinking like a climate scientist today and using what they have learned the past two weeks to create their own climate monitoring project. Explain how in the real world it costs money to conduct research. To get money, scientists apply for grants. Grants are free money that organizations give to scientists to help the planet. Place fake money on table (See Materials Section). There is only enough grant money for two groups to do their project. The two best grant proposals will be awarded the funding and will be able to make a difference in the world.

Pass out worksheets 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 (In materials section). Read through the papers explaining sections if necessary. Be sure to discuss Grant Proposal Rubric. Explain that grant proposals will be scored using the rubric. Have students score worksheet 8.2 (the model) and discuss the scores given.

Ask what could you research? Brainstorm research ideas as a class.

 3. Student work time (Students can work in groups, pairs, or individually according to teacher preference). It may be helpful to have computer time available in case students need more background knowledge about a topic. See Additional Resources section for web links that may helps students.

Assessment Materials

Have students share their ideas. Depending on time, some options include:

Doing a quick whip around/share out

Putting proposals on tables and doing a gallery walk of proposals

Student presentations to the class

• Creating a poster for a mini science fair, etc.

Additional Resources

EPA kid friendly website all about the basics of climate change

http://www.epa.gov/climatestudents/basics/index.html

Website of games, activities, and other resources all about global warming

http://globalwarmingkids.net/

Provides information on animals impacted by climate change from around the globe

http://www.wwf.org.uk/what_we_do/tackling_climate_change/impacts_of_climate_change/climate_change_and_animals.cfm

Details impacts of climate change on various sea animals

http://www.neaq.org/conservation_and_research/climate_change/effects_on_ocean_animals.php

Website all about how kids can reduce energy consumption

http://www.energystar.gov/kids

Helpful slideshow on climate change, weather, and climate

http://www.slideshare.net/allsaintsscience/5th-grade-ch-8-lesson-5-what-is-climate

Related Lessons or Education Materials

Day 1- Earth as a System

Day 2- Weather vs Climate

Day 3- Watershed

Day 4- Climate Science Data and Tools

Day 5- Field Trip

Day 6- NPS Connections

Day 7- Project Preparation

Day 8- Evaluations

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Last updated: June 19, 2015

Science News by AGU

Crowdsourced Weather Projects Boost Climate Science Research

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Thousands of volunteers, immobilized by the COVID-19 lockdown, recently revived a trove of historic rainfall records from the United Kingdom and Ireland. The handwritten archives note rainfall observations from landowners, socialites, and an array of eager citizens dating back to the late 17th century. Computer software cannot yet accurately decode handwriting, so human eyes were critical.

Researchers with the Rainfall Rescue project tasked volunteers with manually transcribing 3.34 million observations to make the data available for scientists to study Earth’s past climate.

“We were expecting this to take months,” said Ed Hawkins , a climate scientist at the University of Reading and lead author of the newly published study describing the effort. “We got through it in 16 days.”

The documents contained enough data to extend detailed weather records back to 1836. In doing so, the researchers crowned the new driest year on record for the region: 1855. “We have rewritten the record books, if you like,” said Hawkins, “by going backwards, not forwards.”

Rescued Records Inform Climate Science

High-resolution weather reconstructions combine meteorological observations with algorithms describing atmospheric physics to iteratively produce a near-hourly estimate of global climate over past decades or even centuries. They are a time machine for climate scientists looking to evaluate long-term trends or interrogate past events. Historic data such as those recovered from the United Kingdom and Ireland can help validate a reconstruction, said Laura Slivinski , a physical scientist with NOAA and the colead on the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project (version 3), which generated a global atmospheric data set of weather spanning 1836–2015.

Historic data document some particularly extreme events, and that can help scientists understand why and how such events happen, said Drew Lorrey , a climate and environmental scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. “That’s really powerful, because we can then look in our modern models for similar patterns that are rising months into the future and use that as an early-warning system.”

Records from recent decades show that extreme weather events are becoming more common. “People need to make decisions now about building resilience to the weather in general and how that weather is changing,” Hawkins said. “We need to know what a 1-in-100-year or a 1-in-200-year flood looks like.”

Holes Need Filling

“The further back in time you go, the fewer observations you have, the more work those observations have to do to bring the whole global estimate towards reality.”

Climate reconstructions rely on an enormous database of observations—the bulk of which come from the decades since the proliferation of satellites. Before that time, data are spotty. “The further back in time you go, the fewer observations you have, the more work those observations have to do to bring the whole global estimate towards reality,” said Slivinski, who was not involved with the recent study but works with Hawkins and Lorrey on other projects.

Gaps in climate databases are particularly glaring in the Southern Hemisphere, where there is less land from which to make observations, Lorrey explained. These data rescue efforts are key to filling holes, he said.

Lorrey, who was not involved with Rainfall Rescue, leads the Southern Weather Discovery project , which is recovering early 20th-century weather records from stations in New Zealand and Antarctica and ship logs from ships sailing the Southern Ocean. He and colleagues outlined their approach to crowdsourced record digitization in a paper published in Patterns . Volunteers have so far digitized nearly 250,000 observations from the region.

Although data quality is a concern for the Rainfall Rescue and Southern Weather Discovery records, there’s strength in numbers, said Kevin Trenberth , a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and lead author of the 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. “An observation not made is lost forever,” he said. “And here, a lot of observations have been made.”

A Shared Experience

Crowdsourced weather data have benefits beyond science. Rainfall Rescue volunteers took to the project’s forums to talk about interesting notes they came across in the records, such as one entry from World War II that mentioned a bullet hole in the rain gauge. Sharing their experiences helped volunteers feel like part of a community, Hawkins said. “There are so many good comments on the chat forums about people feeling useful.”

Modern-day rainfall observers continue to provide precious data. Ongoing initiatives such as the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network ( CoCoRaHS ) have been collecting rainfall data from volunteers in the United States for more than 20 years. The project gives people an outlet for their weather curiosity, said Melissa Griffin , the South Carolina CoCoRaHS coordinator.

And CoCoRaHS volunteers are providing more than just numbers; reports filed during Hurricane Matthew in 2016 include comments about which streets were flooded and where animals were on the move to escape rising streams. That information is valuable for distributing resources in an emergency or estimating future water resources, Griffin said.

“You know you are providing data to your community and your community is using [those] data,” she said.

—Jennifer Schmidt ( @DrJenGEO ), Science Writer

Citation:  Schmidt, J. (2022), Crowdsourced weather projects boost climate science research,  Eos, 103, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EO220233 . Published on 2 June 2022.

Text © 2022. the authors.  cc by-nc-nd 3.0 except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited., features from agu publications, africa’s carbon sink capacity is shrinking, salty soil may release methane on mars, exploring alfvén waves across space—and disciplines.

About the Focus Area

Data science has a key role to play in climate change..

The science, policy, and communication practices around data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have important implications for the climate crisis and the solutions society will utilize in the future.

From machine learning to data visualization, data science techniques are used to study the effects of climate change on marine biology, land use and restoration, food systems, patterns of change in vector borne diseases, and other climate-related issues. Data science is a powerful tool to help researchers understand the uncertainties and ambiguities inherent in data, to identify interventions, strategies, and solutions that realize co-benefits for humanity and the environment, and to evaluate the multiple–and sometimes conflicting–goals of decision-makers.

DSI researchers use the methods and tools of the growing field of data science and apply them to issues relevant to climate change and the environment.

Our researchers combine techniques from data science and environmental science to understand patterns in the global food system and develop strategies that make food-supply chains more nutritious and sustainable. They look at how machine learning can reduce the uncertainty of climate models, use deep learning for climate model superresolution, and help visualize carbon emissions based on raw data. Some combine machine learning with simulations of atmospheric turbulence to develop new models that can track air pollutants and reconstruct 3D scalar fields from 2D satellite images. Others provide innovative training in environmental health sciences, including climate and health. Researchers developed a data collaborative to harness geospatial data to help characterize populations displaced by disaster. This kind of information may help with planning for and responding to large scale natural disasters associated with climate change.

DSI students complete capstone projects to apply data science techniques to real world problems. One recent project used climate data to predict heavy snowfall. Using a data set of regional climate simulations, the student team calculated the frequency of large snow storms and tracked how the storm statistics will change in the future. Another project used machine-learning methods to develop mapped estimates of surface ocean CO2 concentrations from the limited ocean data available to monitor carbon sink to predict climate change. We help our students interpret environmental data by teaching how data are managed, stored, and disseminated, as well as how they are enrolled into various narratives and models of climate change.

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Research Highlights

• Ryan Abernathey, Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Peter deMenocal, Earth and Environmental Sciences and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
• Mu Xu, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Eddy transport of tracers (e.g. heat, salt, dissolved chemicals, etc.) by mesoscale turbulence is important in climate models. However, the scales of eddy transport are about 10~200 km, which are not resolved by coarse-resolution global climate models. Consequently, the mesoscale tracer transports must be parameterized using a subgrid scheme. The goal of parameterization is to predict the tendencies of physical variables including velocity, temperature, salinity etc. due to the unresolved turbulent motions. There are many different types of mesoscale subgrid schemes, and many different tuning parameters. However, evaluating the performance of subgrid scheme quantitatively is difficult. In this work, we present a framework to evaluate the accuracy of subgrid schemes quantitatively with a data-driven method. We run a high-resolution simulation with resolution of about 5 km and consider this as our “truth.” With a coarse-grain method, the high-resolution data is projected to a low-resolution grid. The quantitative aim of eddy parameterization is to mitigate the loss of tracer transport due to the coarse-graining. Based on this consideration, we develop an offline system to calculate the eddy parameterization predictions and evaluate the performance of different subgrid schemes. This work lays a foundation for future data-driven statistical-learning-based methods for ocean eddy tracer transport parameterization.

• Joaquim Goes, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
• Ankit Peshin, Ziyao Zhang and Paridhi Singh, Data Science Institute

This research team travels by ship to different parts of the Atlantic Ocean to collect water samples to study the effects of climate change on marine biology. They are designing an automated system through which seawater may be drawn into their moving ship and continuously analyzed. This automated system is an advancement over the usual method of collecting samples; ocean researchers typically stop their ships at pre-planned locations to collect samples. Data is also being gathered on the diversity of microscopic plant life, particularly plankton, which are critical to the marine ecosystem and to assess the ocean’s ability to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Plankton form the basis of many food chains and are an important indicator of an ocean’s health. When fully functional, the system will provide data required to validate satellite images of the ocean now being developed by NASA, NOAA and other agencies.

• Marco Giometto, Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
• Pierre Gentine and Mostafa Momen, Earth and Environmental Engineering
• Carl Vondrick, Computer Science

Satellite images are routinely used to track pollutant dispersion in the atmosphere, but the inherently two-dimensional information is limited and often impedes the development of effective rapid response plans. This project will develop a machine learning model to predict the three-dimensional structure of pollutant concentrations from satellite images of the dispersion process. Machine learning will be combined with high-fidelity simulations of atmospheric turbulence to guide the development of a model to track scalar dispersion as well as a model to reconstruct the corresponding three-dimensional concentration field from two-dimensional satellite-like information.

• Zsuzsa Marka and Szabolcs Marka, Physics and Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory
• John Wright, Electrical Engineering
• Zelda Moran, Earth Institute

Control of tsetse flies — the vector responsible for African Trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness — is highly dependent on precise, high-volume, and cost-effective separation of tsetse genders. Enabling broad deployment, this team is pioneering machine learning-based robotic systems that use infrared imaging to peek inside tsetse pupae for early, robust, and fast identification of males to be used to suppress the wild tsetse population.

• Ruth DeFries, Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology
• Walter Baethgen, International Research Institute for Climate and Society
• Michael Puma, Center for Climate Systems Research, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
• Kyle Davis, Data Science Institute

This project combines field work with data-driven techniques to study how to improve patterns of food trade in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Food trade patterns are essentially the import and export links that connect the production of food in one country to the consumption of it in another. If, for instance, an exporting country experiences a shortage in food production, it may be unable to provide the usual amount of exports to its trade partners. This project assesses how vulnerable these exporting countries are to production shortfalls, and how importing countries may buffer themselves against these possible shortfalls so they are not adversely affected. Research in food-system sustainability aims to minimize the effects of food production on the environment, working with local residents and experts to adapt agricultural systems to protect the environment and mitigate climate change.

• Christoph Meinrenken, Earth Institute

Carbon Catalogue, a free online interactive tool, visualizes the carbon emissions in hundreds of consumer and commercial products around the world. Co-developed with CoClear, a Columbia-alumna founded sustainability analytics firm, Carbon Catalogue, is based on raw data from CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project). Its visualization features were further honed during a DSI hackathon.

• Robert Chen, Center for International Earth and Science Information

Network Groups tasked with planning for and responding to disasters and humanitarian crises contend with data that is often fragmented, delayed, and limited in reliability. This project focuses on setting up the Data Collaborative and Modalities of Communication involving key users from the Platform on Disaster Displacement, (PDD) Columbia University’s humanitarian research community, selected commercial providers, and other relevant data science organizations and experts. It also identifies the data/information needs of the humanitarian/displacement tracking community and develops pilot tests of selected data streams (Internet location, night-time lights, etc.).

• Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Earth Institute

Every winter the news media covers stories of massive disruption caused by large snowfalls for which cities and counties in the Eastern U.S. are apparently ill-prepared. The impact of large snow events is worse in regions that rarely get them and the observational statistics of their likelihood are limited because of their rarity. Nonetheless, there are anticipated changes in these statistics because of two possible counterbalancing factors in climate change — overall warming which might reduce snow events at the southern edge of the region and greater intensity of precipitation and higher atmospheric water vapor content, which might increase heavy snowfalls. Using a 50 member regional climate model ensemble, we explore the statistics of highly impactful snowfalls and address where and when we might be able to detect and expect significant changes over time.

• Galen McKinley, Earth and Environmental Science and Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory

Climate is changing due to human emissions of carbon to the atmosphere. But not all the carbon emitted remains in the atmosphere. In fact, over the course of the industrial era, the ocean has absorbed the equivalent of 41 percent of all human fossil-fuel derived carbon dioxide emissions, a phenomenon known as “sink.” Studying the ocean carbon cycle is critical to understanding and predicting climate change. It is also essential for efforts to limit climate change by reducing the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Ocean data are quite sparse, and CO2 in water cannot be directly measured from space. This team uses machine-learning methods to develop mapped estimates of surface ocean CO2 concentrations from the limited data available. Interpreting Urban Environmental Data This pilot course is part of a broader rethinking of archaeology at Columbia. Faculty work towards developing a more integrated archaeology program to bring together expertise and resources from different departments and develop a course which may be offered at the M.A. level and better serve our undergraduate population. The course also provides training in historical terrestrial palaeoecology and cultivates an informed historical consciousness and an understanding of the wider repercussions beyond the field of scientific research and reporting.

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https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/climate-science

Climate Science

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is working to advance measurement capabilities needed to study the world’s climates.  Climate Science seeks to understand the relation between the physical and chemical properties of oceanic, atmospheric, and geographic masses with long term changes in climates.  The Chemical Sciences Division is developing advanced metrology and certified reference materials to provide accurate and reproducible measurements of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide), halocarbons, aerosols, particulate matter, and chemical oceanographic parameters (seawater pH, total alkalinity, and dissolved inorganic carbon) – factors that influence and reflect climate change.  Robust data are essential for the computational models used in assessing trends in climate change that can inform public policy decisions. 

Description

This program encompasses multifaceted efforts to advance the metrology of climate science. Projects include:

• development of ultra-high accuracy optical standards and technologies to determine greenhouse gases (GHGs) concentrations, atmospheric lifetimes, and aerosol radiative forcing
• development of a unified definition of seawater pH that is consistent with the definition of pH in solutions having much lower ionic strength and development of tools and standards to support SI-traceable measurements of seawater chemical parameters
• production of Standard Reference Materials (SRMs®) and other reference materials to provide measurement traceability to the SI (international system of units)
• production of Standard Reference Data (SRD®)
• production of Standard Reference Instrument (SRI)
• development of computational models
• calibration service for ozone analyzers

These activities provide technologies, instruments, standards, data, and informatics tools to support the Nation’s needs to identity and quantify the amount of GHGs and reactivity of aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere, as well as the state of the Earth’s oceans with respect to climate change. By advancing chemical metrology and data analysis tools, these activities provide critically needed aid to policy makers in areas such as environmental research, assessment and mitigation of climate change, and policy development.

Major Accomplishments

• Optical methods for remote sensing of GHG. NIST has developed and applied advanced cavity-enhanced laser spectroscopy methods yielding high-accuracy spectroscopic data for quantitative analysis of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, and oxygen. These methods provide information on amount of substance and isotopic composition. This work has played a key role in enabling accuracy and continuity in space- and ground-based remote-sensing measurements of atmospheric carbon and other species that are required for robust, long-term investigations of climate change and air-quality monitoring.
• Reference Materials for GHG. Exceptionally accurate gas standards have been developed for the three most important atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHG) in air: carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Three sets of concentration standards linked to the kilogram were developed for dissemination to the entire climate science community: Northern Continental Air (SRM 1720), Southern Oceanic Air (SRM 1721), and Halocarbons in Continental Air (SRM 1722). These standard mixtures contain low, background amounts of target species in the Northern- and Southern-Hemispheres, respectively. This work harmonizes and extends previously existing gas standards maintained by participants in the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Global Atmospheric Watch Program with standards needed by other science organizations that conduct research on the global carbon cycle and climate dynamics.
• Aerosol Metrology. Aerosols (i.e., airborne particles) represent the second largest contributor to atmospheric heating (or potentially cooling) after CO2. Aerosols are often heterogeneous in size, density, composition, and morphology. These species either heat or cool earth’s atmosphere depending on the specific aerosol’s absorption and scattering properties. Because the optical properties of aerosols are poorly understood, research has been undertaken to advance the metrology of aerosols to permit the development of improved climate models. A process has been developed that permits particle synthesis and innovative metrological techniques for characterization of aerosol optical properties of relevance to climate change. The key innovations include the ability to generate aerosols of well-defined optical properties, the separation of arbitrarily shaped particles by both size and mass, and measurement of their mass-specific optical absorption and scattering properties. This novel approach enables the establishment of new aerosol standards and overcomes limitations of speed and accuracy inherent in traditionally used filter-based sampling methods.
• pH metrology. Studies of global climate change rely on accurate characterization of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most prominent atmospheric greenhouse gas. Earth's oceans act as a repository for atmospheric CO2, and contain the single greatest quantity of actively cycled carbon in the world. Internationally recognized seawater pH standards are essential in providing an accepted benchmark for the uptake of CO2 by the oceans. NIST has developed, measured, and published results and detailed protocols for primary pH measurements of multiple artificial seawater pH standards that bracket the current and future pH ranges of natural seawater. This effort leverages the long-term experience of NIST with primary laboratory measurements of pH, the results of which are formally recognized by international comparisons with other National Metrology Institutes worldwide, to seawater pH metrology. Three aspects are recognized: (1) primary pH metrology (documented through pH SRMs and international pH Key Comparisons performed as part of the NIST involvement in CCQM and SIM, (2) new procedures developed at NIST for assessing the purity and homogeneity of indicator reagents, (3) published methodology for characterizing the pH response of indicator dyes, including rigorous uncertainty statements as a component required for achieving measurement traceability to the SI.

• Direct air capture (DAC). Direct air capture technologies extract carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from Earth’s atmosphere. The CO2 can be stored via mineralization in deep geological formations or used in applications such as in food processing or the production of synthetic fuels. DAC is therefore one potential component towards achieving net negative emissions and contributing to the mitigation of global warming and climate change. Because of the low concentrations of CO2 in air (≈0.04%), for DAC to be successful, a new generation of sorbents, the materials that can capture and release CO2, will be required. These materials must have a high uptake capacity, have an energy-efficient uptake/release cycle, and operate over multiple uptake/release cycles at efficient rates over a range of temperatures and humidities. New and tailored instrumentation is required to make such measurements. Candidate DAC materials include metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), modified silicates, and zeolites. To accelerate this technological innovation, the Division has a combined experimental and theoretical program. The experimental program includes measurements of the adsorption capacity of a material under static pressure and constant temperature conditions—known as sorption isotherm measurements. Another technique--known as breakthrough analysis—provides insights into a material’s performance under dynamic conditions. These measurements also provide information about how a material works with multicomponent gases and about the selectivity of a sorbent. Theoretical studies of these materials provide insights into the structure-property relationship of these sorbents, which This allows for a better understanding of the performance of these materials and enables the design of new materials. Of course, new instruments and theoretical methods are being developed as a part of this effort. Ultimately, the goal is to provide reference sorption data on reference DAC materials. This will allow for the critical and impartial evaluation of new, emerging DAC materials and a more comprehensive understanding of their performance.
• Climate models. In addition to carbon dioxide and methane, atmospheric release of other compounds often used by U.S. industry are thought to contribute to the global warming. The EPA has identified a set of nearly 1,200 compounds that are known or reasonable suspected to have a significant global warming potential (GWP). NIST has developed models that help to identify the GWP for individual compounds, based on quantum chemistry and artificial neural network calculations.

ASSOCIATED PUBLICATIONS

1. Orkin, V. L., Khamaganov, V. G., and Kurylo, M. J., "Experimental kinetic study of the reactions between OH radicals and three 2-butenes over the temperature range 220-370 K and pressure range 0.67-40 kPa (5-300 Torr)," International Journal of Chemical Kinetics, 55, 221-237 (2023). 

2. Clegg, S. L., Humphreys, M. P., Waters, J. F., Turner, D. R., and Dickson, A. G., "Chemical speciation models based upon the Pitzer activity coefficient equations, including the propagation of uncertainties. II. Tris buffers in artificial seawater at 25C, and an assessment of the seawater Total pH scale," Marine Chemistry, 244, (2022). 

3. Gordon, I. E., Rothman, L. S., Hargreaves, R. J., Hashemi, R., Karlovets, E. V., Skinner, F. M., Conway, E. K., Hill, C., Kochanov, R. V., Tan, Y., Wcislo, P., Finenko, A. A., Nelson, K., Bernath, P. F., Birk, M., Boudon, V., Campargue, A., Chance, K. V., Coustenis, A., Drouin, B. J., Flaud, J. M., Gamache, R. R., Hodges, J. T., Jacquemart, D., Mlawer, E. J., Nikitin, A. V., Perevalov, V. I., Rotger, M., Tennyson, J., Toon, G. C., Tran, H., Tyuterev, V. G., Adkins, E. M., Baker, A., Barbe, A., Cane, E., Csaszar, A. G., Dudaryonok, A., Egorov, O., Fleisher, A. J., Fleurbaey, H., Foltynowicz, A., Furtenbacher, T., Harrison, J. J., Hartmann, J. M., Horneman, V. M., Huang, X., Karman, T., Karns, J., Kassi, S., Kleiner, I., Kofman, V., Kwabia-Tchana, F., Lavrentieva, N. N., Lee, T. J., Long, D. A., Lukashevskaya, A. A., Lyulin, O. M., Makhnev, V. Y., Matt, W., Massie, S. T., Melosso, M., Mikhailenko, S. N., Mondelain, D., Muller, H. S. P., Naumenko, O. V., Perrin, A., Polyansky, O. L., Raddaoui, E., Raston, P. L., Reed, Z. D., Rey, M., Richard, C., Tobias, R., Sadiek, I., Schwenke, D. W., Starikova, E., Sung, K., Tamassia, F., Tashkun, S. A., Vander Auwera, J., Vasilenko, I. A., Vigasin, A. A., Villanueva, G. L., Vispoel, B., Wagner, G., Yachmenev, A., and Yurchenko, S. N., "The HITRAN2020 molecular spectroscopic database," Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer, 277, (2022). 

4. Guallart, E. F., Fajar, N. M., Garcia-Ibanez, M. I., Castano-Carrera, M., Santiago-Domenech, R., Hassoun, A. E., Perez, F. F., Easley, R. A., and Alvarez, M., "Spectrophotometric Measurement of Carbonate Ion in Seawater over a Decade: Dealing with Inconsistencies," Environmental Science & Technology, 56, 7381-7395 (2022). 

5. Humphreys, M. P., Waters, J. F., Turner, D. R., Dickson, A. G., and Clegg, S. L., "Chemical speciation models based upon the Pitzer activity coefficient equations, including the propagation of uncertainties: Artificial seawater from 0 to 45C," Marine Chemistry, 244, (2022). 

6. Lisak, D., Charczun, D., Nishiyama, A., Voumard, T., Wildi, T., Kowzan, G., Brasch, V., Herr, T., Fleisher, A. J., Hodges, J. T., Ciurylo, R., Cygan, A., and Maslowski, P., "Dual-comb cavity ring-down spectroscopy," Scientific Reports, 12, (2022). 

7. Long, D. A., Adkins, E. M., Mendonca, J., Roche, S., and Hodges, J. T., "The effects of advanced spectral line shapes on atmospheric carbon dioxide retrievals," Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer, 291, (2022). 

8. Bailey, D. M., Zhao, G., and Fleisher, A. J., "Precision Spectroscopy of Nitrous Oxide Isotopocules with a Cross-Dispersed Spectrometer and a Mid-Infrared Frequency Comb," Analytical Chemistry, 92, 13759-13766 (2020). 

9. Li, X. Y., Garcia-Ibanez, M. I., Carter, B. R., Chen, B. S., Li, Q., Easley, R. A., and Cai, W. J., "Purified meta-Cresol Purple dye perturbation: How it influences spectrophotometric pH measurements," Marine Chemistry, 225, (2020). 

10. Yao, Q., Asa-Awuku, A., Zangmeister, C. D., and Radney, J. G., "Comparison of three essential sub-micrometer aerosol measurements: Mass, size and shape," Aerosol Science and Technology, 54, 1197-1209 (2020). 

11. Brewer, P. J., Kim, J. S., Lee, S., Tarasova, O. A., Viallon, J., Flores, E., Wielgosz, R. I., Shimosaka, T., Assonov, S., Allison, C. E., van der Veen, A. M. H., Hall, B., Crotwell, A. M., Rhoderick, G. C., Hodges, J. T., Mahn, J., Zellweger, C., Moossen, H., Ebert, V., and Griffith, D. W. T., "Advances in reference materials and measurement techniques for greenhouse gas atmospheric observations," Metrologia, 56, (2019). 

12. Plusquellic, D. F., Wagner, G. A., Briggman, K., Fleisher, A. J., Long, D. A., and Hodges, J. T., "Simultaneous DIAL, IPDA and point sensor measurements of the greenhouse gases, CO2 and H2O," 2019 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (Cleo), (2019). 

13. Zangmeister, C. D., Grimes, C. D., Dickerson, R. R., and Radney, J. G., "Characterization and demonstration of a black carbon aerosol mimic for instrument evaluation," Aerosol Science and Technology, 53, 1322-1333 (2019). 

14. Rhoderick, G. C., Kelley, M. E., Miller, W. R., Norris, J. E., Carney, J., Gameson, L., Cecelsld, C. E., Harris, K. J., Goodman, C. A., Srivastava, A., and Hodges, J. T., "NIST Standards for Measurement, Instrument Calibration, and Quantification of Gaseous Atmospheric Compounds," Analytical Chemistry, 90, 4711-4718 (2018). 

15. Zangmeister, C. D., You, R., Lunny, E. M., Jacobson, A. E., Okumura, M., Zachariah, M. R., and Radney, J. G., "Measured in-situ mass absorption spectra for nine forms of highly-absorbing carbonaceous aerosol," Carbon, 136, 85-93 (2018). 

16. Zangmeister, C. D., Radney, J. G., "Absorption Spectroscopy of Black and Brown Carbon Aerosol,". In: Multiphase Environmental Chemistry in the Atmosphere. ACS Publications, pp. 275-297 (2018). 

17. Bailey, D. M., Adkins, E. M., and Miller, J. H., "An open-path tunable diode laser absorption spectrometer for detection of carbon dioxide at the Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research Site near Fairbanks, Alaska," Applied Physics B, 123, 1-10 (2017). 

18. Radney, J. G., You, R., Zachariah, M. R., and Zangmeister, C. D., "Direct In Situ Mass Specific Absorption Spectra of Biomass Burning Particles Generated from Smoldering Hard and Softwoods," Environmental Science & Technology, 51, 5622-5629 (2017). 

19. Radney, J. G. and Zangmeister, C. D.,  "Light source effects on aerosol photoacoustic spectroscopy measurements," Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 187, 145-149 (2017). 

20. Zangmeister, C., "Measured absorption spectra of aerosolized carbonaceous species and their influence on climate forcing," Abstracts of Papers of the American Chemical Society, 254, (2017). 

21. Allison, T. C., "Application of an Artificial Neural Network to the Prediction of OH Radical Reaction Rate Constants for Evaluating Global Warming Potential," Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 120, 1854-1863 (2016). 

22. Betowski, D., Bevington, C., and Allison, T. C., "Estimation of Radiative Efficiency of Chemicals with Potentially Significant Global Warming Potential," Environmental Science & Technology, 50, 790-797 (2016). 

23. Radney, J. G. and Zangmeister, C. D.,  "Practical limitations of aerosol separation by a tandem differential mobility analyzer-aerosol particle mass analyzer," Aerosol Science and Technology, 50, 160-172 (2016). 

24. Rhoderick, G. C., Kitzis, D. R., Kelley, M. E., Miller, W. R., Hall, B. D., Dlugokencky, E. J., Tans, P. P., Possolo, A., and Carney, J., "Development of a Northern Continental Air Standard Reference Material," Analytical Chemistry, 88, 3376-3385 (2016). 

25. Lin, H., Reed, Z. D., Sironneau, V. T., and Hodges, J. T., "Cavity ring-down spectrometer for high-fidelity molecular absorption measurements," Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer, 161, 11-20 (2015). 

26. Long, D. A., Wojtewicz, S., Miller, C. E., and Hodges, J. T., "Frequency-agile, rapid scanning cavity ring-down spectroscopy (FARS-CRDS) measurements of the (30012)<-(00001) near-infrared carbon dioxide band," Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer, 161, 35-40 (2015). 

27. Orkin, V. L., Khamaganov, V. G., and Guschin, A. G., "Photochemical Properties of Hydrofluoroethers CH3OCHF2, CH3OCF3, and CHF2OCH2CF3: Reactivity toward OH, IR Absorption Cross Sections, Atmospheric Lifetimes, and Global Warming Potentials," Journal of Physical Chemistry A, 118, 10770-10777 (2014). 

28. Orkin, V. L., Martynova, L. E., and Kurylo, M. J., "Photochemical Properties of trans-1-Chloro-3,3,3-trifluoropropene (trans-CHCl=CHCF3): OH Reaction Rate Constant, UV and IR Absorption Spectra, Global Warming Potential, and Ozone Depletion Potential," Journal of Physical Chemistry A, 118, 5263-5271 (2014). 

29. Radney, J. G., You, R. A., Ma, X. F., Conny, J. M., Zachariah, M. R., Hodges, J. T., and Zangmeister, C. D., "Dependence of Soot Optical Properties on Particle Morphology: Measurements and Model Comparisons," Environmental Science & Technology, 48, 3169-3176 (2014). 

30. Rhoderick, G. C., Duewer, D. L., Apel, E., Baldan, A., Hall, B., Harling, A., Helmig, D., Heo, G. S., Hueber, J., Kim, M. E., Kim, Y. D., Miller, B., Montzka, S., and Riemer, D., "International Comparison of a Hydrocarbon Gas Standard at the Picomol per Mol Level,"  Analytical Chemistry, 86, 2580-2589 (2014). 

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Uw earthlab announces 2024-25 innovation grants projects for climate & social justice.

UW EarthLab awards $400,000 to develop actionable research at the intersection of climate change & social justice, making a positive impact on people’s lives and livelihoods

March 28,2024

Today EarthLab announced that five community-centered teams have been selected for the 2024-25 Innovation Grants program. Each team will receive $80,000 to research and develop new and actionable knowledge on community-driven projects at the intersection of climate change and social justice. To date, EarthLab has awarded nearly two million dollars in Innovation Grant funding to 29 transdisciplinary teams across five cohorts.

The Innovation Grants Program invests in collaborations that span academic disciplines, engage multiple sectors and center community questions that are taking equitable action on climate change. This year, 33 teams submitted letters of intent to apply to the Request for Proposals (RFP), of which 12 full proposals were submitted. Proposals were evaluated by a 10-member review committee that included faculty and staff from several disciplines and community partners from outside of the university. 

Winning project teams include faculty from a range of disciplines at the University of Washington, including environmental & forest sciences, landscape architecture, civil & environmental engineering, French & Italian studies, marine & environmental affairs, international studies, global health, architecture, management & organization, and more. Partners from beyond the university include Tribal leaders and communities, city governments, community organizers and other universities.

“One of the greatest challenges for addressing climate change in my community is finding partnerships to conceptualize and materialize solutions,” shared Leydiana Menacho, Community Lead for the project Healing Amazonian Soils with Science and Indigenous Artisanry: Implementing Community-Based Composting System in the Urban Amazon. “I believe the EarthLab grant provide[s] us with the opportunity to consolidate a team and the support needed to refine and implement our ideas to introduce composting systems in the Amazon for the benefits of our ecosystems and people.”

In addition to the funds awarded, Innovation Grant recipients receive administrative and communications support throughout the eighteen month award period. All teams are part of our fifth grants cohort, which are workshop-style meetings designed to share resources on interdisciplinary and community-engaged research, create the opportunity for co-learning and networking, and to provide a structured space to work collaboratively on their projects. Final products intended to make a positive impact on people and communities are due by September 25, 2025. 

Learn more about the Innovation Grants program here and check back often for news regarding the Cohort 1 , Cohort 2 , Cohort 3 & Cohort 4 funded projects.

This Year’s Funded Projects

In the hands of future generations: tribal youth and uw students responding to climate grief through restoration action, research, and video storytelling.

This project focuses on climate grief amongst Indigenous and non-indigenous youth. This project expands an ongoing collaboration between the University of Washington and Chief Leschi Schools to include non-governmental, government agencies, and the Nisqually Tribe. Students will come to better understand their climate grief. Indigenous youth will learn about their culture and roles as environmental stewards. Through various creative workshops leading to food forest restoration projects on two Indigenous land sites, youth leadership and intercultural education will be fostered. A video will be created about this process and disseminated widely. Multiple methods will be used to assess how this process and outputs impact youth climate grief. Masters theses will lead to a peer reviewed journal article.

Research Team: Principal Investigator: Patrick Christie, Professor, UW Seattle College of the Environment, School of Marine and Environmental Affairs

Community Lead: Binah McCloud (Puyallup), Director of Culture, Chief Leschi Schools

UW Co-Investigator: Jonathan Warren, Professor, UW Seattle College of Arts & Sciences, Jackson School of International Studies

UW Students:  Kayley Pingeon, Graduate student, UW Seattle College of the Environment, School of Marine and Environmental Affairs Thor Belle, Student- Graduate, Graduate student, UW Seattle College of the Environment, School of Marine and Environmental Affairs

Collaborators: Yvette Duenas (Quileute), Academic Collaborator, Teacher, Chief Leschi Schools Don Brummett, Community Collaborator, Chief Leschi Schools Interim Superintendent Hanford McCloud (Nisqually), Community Collaborator, Government to Government Liaison for the Nisqually Tribal Council Aidan McCloud (Nisqually), Community Collaborator Keith Secola (Anishinaabe), Community Collaborator, Musician, Native American Production Cooperative John Weller, Academic Collaborator, Only One Senior Fellow, Only One Jeanette Dorner, Community Collaborator, Executive Director, Nisqually Land Trust Derek Churchill, Community Collaborator, Forest Health Scientist, Washington Department of Natural Resources Ashley Blazina-Cooper, Community Collaborator, Environmental Justice and Western WA Forest Health Planner, Washington Department of Natural Resources

Catalyzing Just Circular Communities: A Feasibility Study of a Large-Scale Anaerobic Biodigester to Generate Hyper-local, Community-Owned Clean Energy Infrastructure in Seattle’s South Park

The Just Circular Communities (JCC) collaboration is a community-initiated movement to develop community-envisioned, owned, and managed hyper-localized circular economies for Frontline communities. Such circular systems and infrastructure have the potential to address systemic displacement, economic stagnation, and resilience in communities that experience the worst effects of climate change through material recovery that maintains local resources and place-based employment. One example of a resource recovery infrastructure is an anaerobic biodigester. By converting food waste into probiotic plant food and clean energy in the form of biogas for fuel and/or electricity, the biodigester can serve as a catalyst for a community-scale circular economy that supports a shift away from fossil fuels and privatization of essential goods and services and toward shared resources and community-benefitting infrastructures.

This project engages in a feasibility study of a large-scale anaerobic biodigester for the South Park neighborhood of Seattle. Our transdisciplinary team includes a novel mix of designers, engineers, planners, and economists that will collaborate with existing community partners in South Park to ensure the project aligns with community visions. The project will generate a schematic design for a biodigester co-developed through participatory design methods, a financial feasibility study and business plan for the biodigester’s operation and end-product markets, and complete economic contributions analysis to assess the broader social and economic benefits of the pilot project. Outcomes of the study will be gathered in a feasibility report for the development, installation, and short and long-term implementation of a large scale pilot anaerobic biodigester that documents the environmental, social, and economic benefits of the project. The accessible dissemination of project findings to the community is a main priority of the team. Results will be shared via a community meeting with a multimedia exhibit, and published on the JCC website where community members within South Park, the Duwamish Valley, and beyond can engage with the data generated by the project.

Research Team:

Principal Investigator: Catherine De Almeida, Associate Professor, UW Seattle College of Built Environments, Landscape Architecture

Community Lead: Edwin Alberto Hernandez Reto, Project Coordinator, Duwamish Valley Sustainability Association (DVSA)

UW Co-Investigators:   Gundula Proksch, Associate Professor, UW Seattle College of Built Environments, Architecture Christian Primack Metcalfe, Affiliate Instructor of Entrepreneurship, UW Seattle Michael G. Foster School of Business, Department of Management and Organization

UW Student: Sarah Chu, Graduate student, UW Seattle College of Built Environments, Landscape Architecture

Collaborators:  Todd Schindler, Community Collaborator, Project Coordinator, Duwamish Valley Sustainability Association (DVSA) Michelle Benetua, Community Collaborator, Director of Strategic Partnerships and Programs, Seattle Parks Foundation Nathanial Trull, Academic Collaborator, Associate, ECOnorthwest Todd Schindler, Community Collaborator, Project Coordinator, Duwamish Valley Sustainability Association (DVSA) Bonnie Gee Yosick, Academic Collaborator, Senior Economic Advisor, ECOnorthwest Brian Allen, Academic Collaborator, Business Consultant, 360 Social

Fish, fire, food, and floodplains: Healing place and people

It’s all connected, and it all starts with water. That’s how Klamath Tribal members with the Ambodat Department summed up the motivation for this project. Ambodat is the Klamath word for in, at, or on the water. Water shortages, toxic algae, federally listed endangered sucker fish, vulnerable salmon returning after long-sought dam removal, and on-going degradation of habitat for other first foods all threaten the resilience of those dependent on the ecosystems of the Upper Klamath Basin in south central Oregon. These challenges result, at least in part, from more than a century of imbalance in land use practices, including fire suppression and water diversion, that favor short-term profits and industrial agriculture.

Climate-adapted restoration of ecosystems that regulate water quality, storage, and delivery is a critical step toward promoting social justice in this region. To support this effort, we will generate a landscape-level inventory of incised channels that disconnect streams from floodplains for the Klamath Reservation (~1.2 million acres). Reconnecting streams with floodplains improves water quality and quantity by trapping sediment and agricultural runoff, increasing water storage, and slowing flow rates so that winter precipitation lingers longer into the summer drought season. Our project stems from the urgent need for landscape-level restoration and the demonstrated potential for rapid and cascading benefits from restoring landscape patterns and ecosystem functions. In addition to delivering continuous, comprehensive, landscape-level inventories and maps of incised channels, disconnected floodplains, and wetland potential, we will develop a story map that illustrates the scope of the challenge and the potential for recovery of ecosystems that regulate water supply and are biodiversity hotspots. Living memory and traditional knowledge personalize the radical changes that limit access to first foods (including the first of these, water) on the Klamath Tribes’ home lands. Climate warming compounds long-term challenges, and extreme droughts in recent years exacerbate water scarcity, a recurring challenge in the Upper Klamath Basin. Our story map will describe how climate-adapted restoration of streams and floodplains could provide multiple benefits to the region by restoring landscape patterns that regulate water storage and delivery.

Principal Investigator: L. Monika Moskal, Professor; Director, Precision Forestry Cooperative, UW Seattle College of the Environment, School of Environmental & Forest Sciences

Community Lead: Debbie Johnson, Principal, Applegate Forestry LLC

UW Co-Investigator: Brittany Johnson, Assistant Professor, UW Seattle College of the Environment, School of Environmental & Forest Sciences

UW Student: TBD, PhD student or candidate, Seattle UW Seattle College of the Environment School of Environmental & Forest Sciences

Collaborators:  Meghan Halabisky, Academic Collaborator, Research Scientist, UW Seattle College of the Environment, School of Environmental & Forest Sciences Keala Hagmann, Academic Collaborator, Affiliate Assistant Professor, UW Seattle College of the Environment, School of Environmental & Forest Sciences Shahnie Rich, Community Collaborator, Environmental Scientist, The Klamath Tribes Ambodat Department Brad Parrish, Community Collaborator, Water Rights Specialist, The Klamath Tribes Ambodat Department

Healing Amazonian Soils with Science and Indigenous Artisanry: Implementing Community-Based Composting System in the Urban Amazon

Composting is a core climate change adaptation and mitigation strategy in major cities, yet experiences are limited in low- and middle-income countries. Iquitos, a city with half a million people in the Peruvian Amazon, faces challenges with an unreliable waste collection system, leading to waste accumulation that harms ecosystems, public health, and water sources, particularly affecting vulnerable Indigenous communities living on river floodplains. 60% of this waste is organic and compostable. A multidisciplinary team of UW, Peruvian researchers, young activist residents from Iquitos, and the Kukama Indigenous community partnered to design a city-wide composting system and an implementation plan. To achieve both goals, the team utilizes a “design thinking” approach that starts by documenting the perspectives of community stakeholders. Subsequently, the academic team will research and experiment with composting systems in situ. Later, the team will organize co-creation sessions to design the composting and implementation plan with the residents of Iquitos and the Kukama community. The Kukamas produce traditional pottery art, utilizing clay from the Amazon basin rivers, natural local pigments, and wood collected from the shores for their ovens. This sustainable and traditional art serves as inspiration for designing elements in the composting system, particularly the compost bin. Additional workshops, requested and co-organized by the Kukamas, aim to improve their techniques and business model in anticipation of large-scale implementation. Once the composting system and the implementation plan are conceptualized, they will be implemented in a pilot in 30 households. Participants will receive a Kukama compost bin, supplies, tools, educational materials, and training on how to use and maintain the system. Over eight months, the team will assess the performance of the composting system, implementation, and health and hygiene practices. The results of this first cycle will be compiled in a final report and presented in seminars at the National University of the Peruvian Amazon, with the participation of the Kukama community and Iquitos’ residents, as well as at the University of Washington. After this project, the partnership will continue working on the long-term vision and utilize the pilot’s results to craft the next steps for expanding the program city-wide.

Principal Investigator: Rebecca Neumann, Associate Professor, UW Seattle College of Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Community Lead: Leydiana Menacho, Community Leader, Kukama Compost

UW Co-Investigators:   Joseph Zunt, Professor, UW Seattle School of Public Health, Global Health Rebecca Bachman, Lecturer, UW Seattle College of Built Environments, Landscape Architecture

UW Student: Coco Alarcon, a PhD student, UW Seattle School of Public Health, Global Health and Implementation Science

Collaborators:  Sally Brown, Academic Collaborator, Research Professor, UW Seattle College of the Environment, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences Ranulfo Segundo Meléndez Celis, Academic Collaborator, Professor

Life, In Spite of It All: Water, Wetlands, and Reclamation in a Changing Climate

Our project in southern Mauritania centers the voices and experiences of the Haalpulaar’en community of Khareirat and its relationship with Tambass, a 4,400-acre wetlands area. Mauritania has always been hot and arid, but it is now experiencing increasingly wild oscillations between drought (e.g., 2020-2022) and periods of violent rain and flooding (August 2022, July 2023). The country’s few wetlands provide crucial flood-control and water-storage buffers, among other ecosystem services, in an increasingly unpredictable hydrologic context. Against this already fraught backdrop, human actors recently drained Tambass, a critical water source for the herders of Khareirat, their animals, migratory birds, and countless other life forms. Without some type of intervention, the wetland will disappear, like so many others. In the meantime, the diversion eliminated the Haalpulaar’en community’s primary source of water and left the nearby wells upon which they depend unreliable, amplifying the already significant effects of climate change. Quite simply, the hydrocommons of Tambass and the social-ecological cultures it supports are at risk of vanishing. Our interdisciplinary project, codesigned with local partners and the community of Khareirat, aims to bring attention and imagine alternatives to the situation in Tambass, with hopes of restoring water flow to the wetland while illuminating and activating the creativity, agency, and lifeworlds of the communities there, even amidst loss. Through a documentary film developed in partnership with the community and Oscar-nominated filmmakers Aberrahmane Sissako and Kessen Tall, we explore the community’s attempts to live with major hydrologic changes and discover possibilities of action and repair. A qualitative + quantitative-data wetlands map will integrate remotely sensed data about water resources and the lived experience of the Haalpulaar’en into a pilot water bodies monitoring app (with Digital Earth Africa). Finally, historical analysis of drying events will inform how partial restoration might proceed, while we collaboratively build scientific capacity for community knowledge, planning, and self-advocacy via new relationships with local and regional partners. All project activities aim to embody the mutually enriching potential of actionable humanities and science – as forms of reclamation and “repairing the world,” recurrent themes in African art, performance, storytelling, and being in the world. 

Research Team: 

Principal Investigator: Richard Watts, Associate Professor, UW Seattle College of Arts & Sciences, French and Italian Studies

Community Leads:   Abderrahmane Sissako, Co-director of AME, Filmmaker, Association Mauritanienne pour l’Environnement (AME) Kessen Tall, Co-Director of AME, screenwriter, Association Mauritanienne pour l’Environnement (AME)

UW Co-Investigator: Daniel Hoffman, Professor, UW Seattle College of Arts & Sciences, Jackson School of International Studies

UW Student: TBD. Graduate student.  

Collaborators:  Meghan Halabisky, Academic Collaborator, remote-sensing ecologist, UW College of the Environment/Digital Earth Africa, UW Seattle College of the Environment, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences Maureen Ryan, Academic Collaborator, Owner and principal, Dark Creature LLC Lisa Rebelo, Academic Collaborator, interpreter, affiliated with Digital Earth Africa Abou Sow, Community Collaborator, interpreter, affiliated with Association mauritanienne pour l’environnement Sidi Cheiguer, Community Collaborator, interpreter, freelance filmmaker, affiliated with Association mauritanienne pour l’environnement Amadou Sall, Academic Collaborator, Wetland Lead for West Africa, Centre de suivi écologique Dakar, Senegal

© 2024 University of Washington

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May 3, 2022

Thirty years of climate research funding has overlooked the potential of experimental transformative technologies

by Neil Vowles, University of Sussex

A new study from the University of Sussex Business School reveals the technologies and academic disciplines that are being overlooked by research funders in the global fight against climate change.

Potentially transformative technologies such as stratospheric aerosol injection or albedo management have received less than £1 in £500 of climate research funding over the past 30 years while even established climate change responses such as industrial decarbonization have received just a third of the research funding that climate change adaption projects have received.

Based on a sample of 1,000 projects totaling more than $2.2 billion in research funding granted between 1990 and 2020, climate change adaptation projects received the highest proportion (36%), followed by climate mitigation via energy systems (28%), transport and mobility (13%), geoengineering (12%) and industrial decarbonization (11%), reveals the study newly published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews .

Academics in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School reveal that climate research funding over the past three decades has been asymmetrically distributed with the United Kingdom (40%), European Union (27%) and United States (11%) receiving almost four-fifths of all funding disbursed for a sample of 1,000 projects analyzed by the researchers. Countries such as China, India, Israel or Japan received very low amounts of funding; while developing countries, especially in Latin America and Africa hardly feature.

The dominance of the Global North, and the U.K. in particular, is even more prevalent in the academics' analysis of institutions most successful at attracting funding with 20 institutions, 18 of which U.K.-based, sharing 96% of funding worth more than $800m spent on the social sciences, showing a clear concentration among top universities.

Benjamin Sovacool, Professor of Energy Policy in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School, said:

"As a positive sign, our tracking of recent research trends reveals a much stronger role of the social sciences, arts and humanities than we would have predicted. These collective disciplines received about 45% of the funding from our sampled projects over the 30-year period.

"As a negative sign, the hugely disproportionate funding awarded to the U.K., U.S. and EU raises important questions around issues of justice and equity in funding for Research & Development especially on technology and innovation that could help address climate-related challenges, which are expected to adversely affect low-income countries disproportionately in achieving just-transitions. Even accounting for the fact that our dataset overrepresents research projects in the Anglo-Saxon world, that can afford to publish research data in English, it is clear this is a significant failing to support a truly global response to the world's greatest challenge."

Dr. Chux Daniels, Research Fellow in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School, said:

"Policies on research funding shape the dynamics on knowledge, innovation and technology; while technology, innovation and knowledge may in turn, influence research funding, shifts in research priorities and policies on climate change and sustainability. Therefore, deepening understanding on the role of policies in achieving equitable, just and inclusive transition to sustainability is vital for realizing climate change and decarbonizations goals. The transformative innovation policy approach offers useful ideas on technology and innovation-driven development strategies for addressing climate change and decarbonization."

The researchers identify a number of technologies that could have a significant role in limiting climate change but are hugely underfunded in terms of research. These technologies include:

Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) (0.2% of all climate funding)—Although it may sound like science fiction, the study authors say SAI techniques are technically feasible today and could enable near-term reduction of global warming if given more careful consideration within the community.

Marine cloud brightening (0.15%) and Cloud thinning (0%)—The academics argue marine cloud brightening could be deployed relatively quickly, using fleets of ships to spray sea water into the air below marine clouds, thereby increasing the clouds' reflectivity and longevity.

Ocean mirrors (0.15%) and Space sunshades (0.1%)—Both technologies work using the same principle, of placing scatterers, reflectors, or mirrors either across the ocean (terrestrially based) or into the high atmosphere or outer space (above the atmosphere) to reduce the amount of sunlight entering the Earth, thereby reducing warming.

High-albedo crops and buildings (0.1%)—Albedo modification proposes that if less energy is absorbed by the Earth system, the surface of the Earth will cool on average. The authors explain that technology could replicate the impact of huge volcanic explosions which inject huge amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, increasing the Earth's reflectivity (albedo) and decreasing the amount of sunlight absorbed which can lead to temperature drops of around 0.3C for three years. Possible strategies include albedo modification either via buildings (painting them white) or landscapes (managing cropland or marginal land) to better reflect sunlight, particularly in the Arctic but also in areas of high latitude, where sea ice and ice sheets can be protected.

The study also reveals areas of research which receive tiny proportions of the funding available and whose significance and role to play in the fight against climate change, the researchers believe has been overlooked. These include:

Food science and technology (0.036% of climate funding)—The researchers describe this as a troubling funding gap given that the journey from farming activities to food processing and transportation of finished goods to consumption can have significant negative impacts on water consumption, energy consumption, climate change, and other environmental externalities. They note that the food sector via agriculture has a higher national energy demand greater than either China or the United States.

Neuroscience (0.022%)—Social neuroscience, psychology and cognitive neuroscience all have a valuable role to play in informing social interventions that may hamper or facilitate behavioral change, the study authors suggest. They add the specialisms can inform the neural activity behind the behavioral responses to climate change and extreme weather including fear and emotional trauma.

Theology, divinity and religious studies (0.046% and 0.037% respectively)—The study authors argue these disciplines can help researchers better understand deeper spiritual implications of low-carbon transitions including how they may reshape connections to the environment, or promote a new set of values geared towards sustainability (e.g. altruism or frugality).

Sports studies (0.012%)—An important topic the researchers argue given that climate change and extreme weather events are already impacting major events like the Olympics or impacting major sporting leagues. They add that climate change impacts include significant negative effect on human health and account for behavioral change in physical activity.

Classics (0.00009%)—Understanding the lessons from history and the collapse of empires precipitated by environmental calamities and how archaeology and related areas of cultural heritage can inform discussions of global climate response are some of the overlooked value of Classical Studies in the global response to climate change .

Abdulrafiu Abbas, Doctoral Researcher in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School, said:

"The significant funding gaps our study has revealed in research topics identify a tendency of research funders to pursue hot topics by going along with the crowd or groupthink, and also highlights under-researched topics that, perhaps, are even more worthy of exploration.

"Our study also indicates that there is need for research community and funding agencies to promote more transparency and accountability in their funding patterns. In doing so, this would facilitate a deeper understanding of spiritual and historical implications of low-carbon transitions, and connections between the extreme weather events and mother nature that could help set new drivers and dynamics geared towards low-carbon sustainability."

The study also reveals how priority areas for climate research funding have shifted over the years with almost no topic remaining as the top of the funding list for a given period or a given general area of technology.

For example the top funded energy and climate mitigation technology in 1990 was nuclear power but in 2020 it was energy efficiency. The top geoengineering topic was ocean fertilization in 1990 but direct air capture in 2020. The top mobility option was passenger (conventional) transport in 1990, but electric vehicles in 2020.

The study also reveals the impact that major climate conventions have had in shaping the level of funding and also the areas where funding is focussed. Over the 30-year period, the academics identified funding peaks in the early 1990s which coincide with the Rio Convention and the launch of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. A similar jump in funding occurs around 2000, coinciding with the signing of the Kyoto Protocol having its signing period end in 1999, and then a massive surge in funding post 2008 to 2020, which the academics attribute to shifts in policy and technology debates towards net-zero and decarbonisation and the influence of the Paris Accords.

The analysis also reveals that engineering and technology dominated funding patterns from 1998 to 2002, again potentially linked to the Kyoto Protocol, before a surge in support for social science and humanities projects from 2005 onwards.

The paper analyzed the role of public research funding patterns between 1990 and 2020, examining 153, 202 projects funded by 154 research councils across 17 countries including the EU. A deeper analysis was undertaken of 1000 representative projects with a total budget of $2.268 billion.

Provided by University of Sussex

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The Morning

The new climate tech.

Ambitious projects are trying to engineer the atmosphere.

By David Gelles

Lead author of the Climate Forward newsletter.

Infusing clouds with sulfur dioxide to block the sun. Vacuuming carbon dioxide out of thin air. Adding iron to the ocean to draw greenhouse gases down to the sea floor. As recently as a few years ago, technologies designed to change Earth’s atmosphere — what is broadly known as geoengineering — were considered too impractical, too expensive and too outlandish to be taken seriously.

But, as I write in a new article , some of these technologies are being deployed. One is already in place.

The effects of climate change are becoming worse. And nations aren’t meeting their collective goal of slashing greenhouse gas emissions. The stakes are very real: Last year was the hottest in modern history. Oceans around the world are shockingly warm. Floods, fires and droughts are growing more intense.

So investors and entrepreneurs are trying — sometimes unilaterally — to fix that. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain some of those efforts.

Many scientists and environmentalists worry about the safety and efficacy of geoengineering. And some of the best-funded projects are bankrolled by the very oil and gas companies most responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions. Still, plans to intentionally tinker with the planet’s atmosphere are racing ahead.

Underground bubbles

On a warm winter day last month, I traveled to a massive construction site outside Odessa, Texas. There, Occidental Petroleum is building the world’s largest direct air-capture plant. The company plans to turn it on next year.

The mechanics are relatively straightforward: Giant fans blow air across water that has been treated to absorb carbon dioxide. Occidental then uses chemicals to isolate that CO2, mixes the gas with water and pumps it underground. Extreme subterranean pressure keeps the gas locked away forever.

Occidental told me that most of the carbon dioxide it captures will be sequestered in bedrock, removed from the atmosphere for good. But at least some will be used to extract yet more oil from the ground, creating more of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet. Earlier this year, I toured a similar factory in Iceland. That one, built by a Swiss company called Climeworks, doesn’t sell any of its CO2 to oil companies.

Other attempts to tweak the climate are still in their infancy. A California start-up claimed to have released sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in Mexico without permission, hoping to block solar radiation. (Afterward, Mexico imposed a ban on the process.) Researchers in Massachusetts are investigating whether they could generate blooms of phytoplankton that would absorb carbon dioxide and settle on the sea floor.

Who has the power?

Critics of the air-capture plants like those in Texas and Iceland remain skeptical. The projects are enormously expensive and very energy-intensive and snag only a sliver of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe they distract policymakers from the more urgent work of reducing fossil fuel emissions.

Despite these concerns, the market for these ventures is set to boom — from less than $10 billion today to as much as $135 billion by 2040, according to Boston Consulting Group. Occidental is planning to build 100 plants in the coming years, funded in part by $1.2 billion in funding for the technology from the Biden administration. Climeworks wants to build in Kenya, Canada, Europe and Louisiana.

It’s not unusual for a new technology to gain momentum before the major questions about its efficacy, safety and regulation are resolved. Who deserves the right to alter the planet, and what burdens of proof should they first meet?

Right now, there are no international standards governing these new technologies, even though they could affect the whole planet. As one professor of environmental philosophy told me, “We don’t have a great track record of sustained global cooperation.”

For more: Read David’s reporting in Iceland , where carbon capture is a small but growing business.

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Israel-hamas war.

In Jerusalem, thousands of Israelis protested Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for an early election.

Israeli troops withdrew from Al-Shifa , a major Gaza hospital, after a two-week battle.

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India’s economy has grown in the decade since Narendra Modi was elected prime minister. Many Indians are better off, but wealth gaps have widened.

African migrants have filled worker shortages and created a new community in a remote mining town in Quebec.

One part of Italy has bucked the nation’s falling birthrate: Bolzano, where parents enjoy discounted child care and groceries .

Donald Trump ends many of his rallies with a churchlike ritual. Read more about how he infuses his movement with Christianity .

Chinese accounts are pretending to be Trump supporters and spreading misinformation online ahead of November, according to researchers and government officials.

Trump had varied responses to witnesses who testified at his trials: He criticized his former fixer Michael Cohen. He praised others for loyalty .

New York City

The Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival filled Fifth Avenue with color. See more outfits .

Residents in Chinatown are angry about efforts to build what could be the world’s tallest jail there.

A man accused of pushing a stranger in front of a subway train had been in a homeless shelter for people with serious mental illness. He found little help there .

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To some, the Francis Scott Key Bridge symbolized Baltimore. Read reflections about its significance .

A total eclipse crosses the U.S. on April 8. Small towns in its path are preparing to welcome visitors , The Washington Post reports.

The U.S. should work with its adversaries on counterterrorism to prevent attacks like the one in Moscow, Christopher Costa and Colin Clarke write.

Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss nominees for their political April fools .

Here are columns by David French on the rise of religious identity politics and Zeynep Tufekci on Boeing airplane safety .

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Writings on the wall: Landlords used to scrub graffiti off their buildings. Now, they are willing to pay for it .

Ask Vanessa: Can you wear sandals in the office ?

Hiking : The app AllTrails has become a beloved guide for both experts and newbies .

Metropolitan Diary: Worst job interview ever ?

Lives Lived: Lorraine Graves was a ballerina who starred as a principal dancer for the groundbreaking Dance Theater of Harlem for nearly two decades. She died at 66 .

Men’s Final Four: The lineup is set . Alabama will play UConn and Purdue will take on N.C. State.

Elite Eight recap: Purdue beat Tennessee , 72-66, to advance to its first Final Four since 1980. And N.C. State beat Duke , 76-64, to tie a record as the lowest seed to reach the Final Four.

Women’s college basketball: South Carolina is headed to its fourth consecutive Final Four after beating Oregon State, 70-58. More games are tonight, including Iowa v.s L.S.U.

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Meaning: The peace sign, which was designed in the 1950s, was once a powerful symbol for antiwar and countercultural movements. Now, for younger generations, the sign is little more than an anodyne lifestyle motif.

“I take one look at the peace sign, and it feels really dated and meaningless,” a 22-year-old college junior told Michael Rock, a designer and academic. “It reminds me of being in elementary school, and this was on everybody’s water bottles or T-shirts.”

Read more about how the sign’s resonance has changed .

More on culture

Beyoncé fans celebrated the release of “Cowboy Carter,” her latest album, in Nashville. “I’ve never seen so many people that look like me in cowboy hats in my life,” one fan said.

“Oppenheimer,” a movie about the father of the atomic bomb, was released in Japan eight months after its U.S. premiere. Read Japanese viewers’ reactions .

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COASTAL ECOSYSTEMS CLIMATE RESILIENCE

This is the initial announcement of this funding opportunity .

Funding Opportunity Number: EPA-G2024-STAR-C1

Assistance Listing Number : 66.509

Solicitation Opening Date: March 13, 2024 Solicitation Closing Date: May 1, 2024 : 11:59:59 pm Eastern Time

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program, aims to promote scientific progress towards the understanding of coastal ecosystem resilience by seeking applications proposing research to 1) characterize, quantify, and define indicators or metrics of resilience for various types of coastal ecosystems, especially those ecosystems that have climate mitigation and adaptation and/or blue (ocean-stored) carbon sequestration potential (Lovelock and Duarte, 2019); and 2) develop methods and approaches to advance economic valuation of resilience benefits provided by coastal ecosystems.

Two major goals in EPA’s FY2022-2026 Strategic Plan are (1) increasing resilience and adaptation to climate change impacts and (2) protecting and restoring waterbodies and watersheds (EPA, 2022a). Coastal waterbodies and the aquatic ecosystems they contain are at the forefront of climate change impacts (EPA, 2021a). However, the cumulative impacts of other stressors such as rising, warmer, and more acidic seas, stronger and more frequent storms, droughts, and potential co-occurring changes to pollutant fluxes on coastal ecosystem resilience are poorly understood.

This funding opportunity solicits research needed to advance our understanding of the properties and processes important to climate resilience in estuarine and coastal marine ecosystems to better inform coastal ecosystem management strategies. Resilient coastal ecosystems and the benefits they provide may persist over time in the face of multiple stressors or disturbances. However, the cumulative impacts of multiple stressors may exceed resilience capacity, alter ecosystem structure and function, or result in loss of coastal ecosystems. Elucidation of the mechanistic basis of resilience in coastal ecosystems and development of quantitative indicators or metrics rooted in the mechanisms of resilience will greatly advance the science of coastal ecosystem management. Effective coastal ecosystem management strategies also require advances in economic valuation approaches to estimate the benefits provided by coastal ecosystems, particularly those benefits related to increasing climate change resilience (e.g., avoided costs from flooding and property damage, avoided costs from disruptions to commercial activities such as tourism or fisheries, or benefits provided when considered together with other public infrastructure).

Coastal Ecosystems Climate Resilience Funding Opportunity (pdf) (558.5 KB)

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Earth Action: Supporting Climate Resilient Communities (ROSES 2023)

The NASA Earth Science Division (ESD) solicits proposals that support communities in building their resilience to climate impacts through the application of NASA Earth observations. The focus of proposals must be on informing decisions that enhance community-level resilience to episodic and chronic climate stressors. Projects may be up to 3 years, and it is anticipated that 7-9 awards will be made with a total yearly budget of $2M.

This call for proposals aims to increase the use of NASA Earth observations to support community resilience, expand the communities of practice who use NASA Earth observations to develop climate-informed community resilience decisions, demonstrate the value of using NASA Earth observations to prepare for and respond to climate change, and inform NASA’s future strategic engagement and activities on climate resilience.

Proposals must engage communities in advancing climate-informed decisions that enhance their resilience to the impacts of climate change and involve organizations that assist in knowledge sharing between scientists and decision makers. Deadlines:

• NOIs Due: Feb. 23, 2024
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This solicitation calls for proposals that support communities in building their resilience to climate change by utilizing NASA Earth observations. To achieve this objective in a scalable way, proposals must involve organizations that assist in knowledge sharing between scientists and decision makers, have established relationships within communities, and have experience working with communities to build climate resilience. These organizations are called boundary organizations. Through this approach, NASA seeks to enhance the capacity of communities and boundary organizations to utilize NASA Earth observations. Proposals must include communities as equal partners in the development of climate-informed actions that enhance community-level resilience to episodic and chronic climate stressors. Key objectives include:

• Advance the capacity of communities and boundary organizations to utilize NASA Earth observations to enhance community-level climate resilience

• Advance access to and integration of NASA Earth observations in community decision making related to climate resilience

• Advance local solutions that are transferable, scalable, contribute to climate knowledge, and inform climate action

• Enable communities to achieve their resilience goals beyond the project’s completion

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• NEWS FEATURE
• 26 March 2024

How AI is improving climate forecasts

• Carissa Wong

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Illustration: Jasiek Krzysztofiak. Hurricane: Rawpixel; Globe/computer code: Pexels; Weather map: US Dept of Commerce, Weather Bureau (CC BY 2.0)

Climate scientist Tapio Schneider is delighted that machine learning has taken the drudgery out of his day. When he first started modelling how clouds form, more than a decade ago, this mostly involved painstakingly tweaking equations that describe how water droplets, air flow and temperature interact. But since 2017, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have transformed the way he works.

“Machine learning makes this science a lot more fun,” says Schneider, who works at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It’s vastly faster, more satisfying and you can get better solutions.”

Conventional climate models are built manually from scratch by scientists such as Schneider, who use mathematical equations to describe the physical processes by which the land, oceans and air interact and affect the climate. These models work well enough to make climate projections that guide global policy.

But the models rely on powerful supercomputers, take weeks to run and are energy-intensive. A typical model consumes up to 10 megawatt hours of energy to simulate a century of climate, says Schneider. On average, that is about the amount of electricity used annually by a US household. Moreover, such models struggle to simulate small-scale processes, such as how raindrops form, which often have an important role in large-scale weather and climate outcomes, says Schneider.

Think big and model small

The branch of AI called machine learning — in which computer programs learn by spotting patterns in data sets — has shown promise in weather forecasting and is now stepping in to help with these issues in climate modelling.

“The trajectory of machine learning for climate projections is looking really promising,” says computer scientist Aditya Grover at the University of California, Los Angeles. Similar to the early days of weather forecasting, he says, there is a flurry of innovation that promises to transform how scientists model the climate.

But there are still hurdles to overcome — including convincing everyone that models based on machine learning are getting their projections right.

Researchers are using AI for climate modelling in three main ways. The first approach involves developing machine-learning models called emulators, which produce the same results as conventional models without having to crank through all the mathematical calculations.

Think of a conventional climate model as a computer program that can calculate where a ball will land on the basis of physical factors, such as how hard the ball is thrown, where it is thrown from and how fast it is spinning. Emulators can be considered as equivalent to a sports player who learns the patterns in all those modelled outputs and is then able to predict, without crunching through all the maths, where the ball will land.

In a 2023 study, climate scientist Vassili Kitsios at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues developed 15 machine-learning models that could emulate 15 physics-based models of the atmosphere 1 . They trained their system, called QuickClim, using the physical models’ projections of surface air temperature up to the year 2100 for two atmospheric carbon concentration pathways: a low and a high carbon emission scenario. Training each model took about 30 minutes on a laptop, says Kitsios. Researchers then asked the QuickClim models to forecast temperatures under a medium carbon emission scenario, which the models had not seen during training. The results closely matched those of the conventional physics-based models (see ‘AI climate model works at speed’).

Source: Ref. 1

Once trained with all three emissions scenarios, QuickClim could quickly predict how global surface temperatures would change during the century under many carbon emission scenarios — about one million times faster than the conventional model could, says Kitsios. “With traditional models, you have less than five or so carbon concentration pathways you can analyse. QuickClim now allows us to do many thousands of pathways — because it’s fast,” he says.

QuickClim could one day help policymakers by exploring multiple scenarios, which would take conventional approaches simply too long to simulate. Models such as QuickClim will not replace physics-based models, Kitsios says, but could work alongside them.

Another team of researchers, led by atmospheric scientist Christopher Bretherton at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington, developed a machine-learning emulator for one physics-based atmospheric model. In a 2023 preprint study 2 , the team first created a training data set for the model, called ACE, by feeding ten sets of initial atmospheric conditions into a physics-based model. For each set, the physics-based model projected how 16 variables, including air temperature, water vapour and windspeed, would change over the next decade.

How machine learning could help to improve climate forecasts

After training, ACE was able to iteratively use estimates from 6 hours earlier in its projections to make forecasts 6 hours ahead, over a time span of up to a decade. And it performed well: better than a pared-down version of the physics-based model that runs at half the resolution to save on time and computing power. In that comparison, ACE more accurately predicted the state of 90% of the atmospheric variables, ran 100 times faster and was 100 times more energy-efficient.

Study author and climate scientist Oliver Watt-Meyer at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence says he was surprised. “I was impressed by the result. These early findings suggest that we’ll be able to make these models that are very fast, accurate and able to probe a lot of different scenarios,” he says.

Firm foundations

In the second approach, researchers are using AI in a more fundamental way, to power the guts of climate models. These ‘foundation’ models can later be tweaked to perform a wide range of downstream climate- and weather-related tasks.

Foundation models hinge on the idea that there are fundamental, possibly unknown, patterns in the data that are predictive of the future climate, says Grover. By picking up on these hidden patterns, the hope is that foundation models might be able to churn out better climate and weather predictions than conventional approaches can, he says.

In a 2023 paper 3 , Grover and researchers at the tech giant Microsoft built the first such foundation model, called ClimaX. It was trained on the output from five physics-based climate models that simulated the global weather and climate from 1850 to 2015, including factors such as air temperature, air pressure and humidity, simulated on timescales from hours to years. Unlike emulator models, ClimaX was not trained towards the specific task of mimicking an existing climate model.

After this general training, the team fine-tuned ClimaX to perform a wide range of tasks. In one, the model predicted the average surface temperature, daily temperature range and rainfall worldwide from input variables of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, black carbon and methane levels. This task was proposed in 2022 as a benchmark for comparing AI climate models, in a study by atmospheric physicist Duncan Watson-Parris at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues 4 . ClimaX predicted the state of temperature-related variables better than did three climate emulators built by Watson-Parris’s team 3 . However, it performed less well than the best of these three emulators in predicting rainfall, says Grover.

Science and the new age of AI: a Nature special

“I like the idea of foundation models,” says Watson-Parris. But these early findings don’t yet prove that ClimaX can outperform conventional climate models, or that foundation models are intrinsically superior to emulators, he adds.

In fact, it will be difficult to convince people that any machine-learning model can outperform conventional approaches, says Schneider. The true state of the future climate is unknown and we can’t wait for decades to see how well the models are performing, he says. Testing climate models against past climate behaviour is useful, but not a perfect measure of how well they can predict a future that’s likely to be vastly different from what humanity has seen before. Perhaps if models get better at seasonal weather prediction, they’ll be better at long-term climate predictions, too, says Schneider. “But to my knowledge, that’s not yet been demonstrated and that’s no guarantee,” he says.

Moreover, it is hard to interpret the way in which many of the AI models work, a problem known as the the black box of AI, which could make it hard to trust them. “With climate projections, you absolutely need to trust the model to extrapolate,” says Watson-Parris.

Best of both

A third approach is to embed machine-learning components inside physics-based models to produce hybrid models — a sort of compromise, says Schneider.

Snow cover is hard for conventional climate models to predict, but hybrid models that blend machine-learning and physics-based techniques have successfully simulated snow cover and other small-scale processes. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty

In this case, machine-learning models would replace only the parts of conventional models that work less well — typically the modelling of small-scale, complex and important processes such as cloud formation, snow cover and river flows. These are a “key sticking point” in standard climate modelling, says Schneider. “I think the holy grail really is to use machine learning or AI tools to learn how to represent small-scale processes,” he says. Such hybrid models could perform better than purely physics-based models, while being more trustworthy than models built entirely from AI, he says.

In this vein, Schneider and his colleagues have built physical models of Earth’s atmosphere and land that contain machine-learning representations of a handful of such small-scale processes. They perform well, he says, in tests of river-flow and snow-cover projections against historical observations 5 . “We’ve found machine-learning models can be more successful than physical models in simulating certain phenomena,” says Schneider. Watson-Parris agrees with that assessment.

By the end of the year, Schneider and his team hope to complete a hybrid model of the ocean that can be coupled to the atmosphere and land models, as part of their Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) project.

Similar efforts to create ‘digital twins’ of Earth are being developed by NASA and the European Commission. The European project, called Destination Earth (DestinE), is entering its second phase in June this year, in which machine learning will have a key role, says Florian Pappenberger, who leads the forecast department at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.

The ultimate goal, says Schneider, is to create digital models of Earth’s systems, partly powered by AI, that can simulate all aspects of the weather and climate down to kilometre scales, with great accuracy and at lightning speed. We’re not there yet, but advocates say this target is now in sight.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00780-8

Kitsios, V., O’Kane, T. J. & Newth, D. Commun. Earth Environ. 4 , 355 (2023).

Article   Google Scholar  

Watt-Meyer, O. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.02074 (2023).

Nguyen, T., Brandstetter, J., Kapoor, A., Gupta, J. K. & Grover, A. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2301.10343 (2023).

Watson-Parris, D. et al. J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst . 14 , e2021MS002954 (2022).

Charbonneau, A., Deck, K. & Schneider, T. A Physics-Constrained Neural Differential Equation for Data-Driven Seasonal Snowpack Forecasting (Caltech, 2023).

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) invites graduate students and early career professionals who are interested in carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) to apply for the 2024 Research Experience in Carbon Sequestration (RECS) program, which will be held July 21-30, 2024 in Colorado and Wyoming. Applications are due by May 15, 2024.

Founded in 2004, RECS is supported by FECM alongside its applied lab, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). The program offers graduate students and early career professionals the opportunity to learn about all aspects of CCUS and to build their career network. CCUS is a combination of technologies that capture, compress, transport, use, and permanently store carbon dioxide emissions from large, stationary industrial and energy facilities. The program will also cover removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with a process known as direct air capture.

RECS 2024 will include interactive content on a range of CCUS topics. It will incorporate site tours at a power plant, coal mine, carbon capture facility, direct air capture facility, and injection wellhead, and include geology field exercises, live lectures, discussion sessions, and group projects. Some of the Nation’s leading CCUS experts from DOE and its national laboratories, the energy industry, CCUS project developers, and academia will join the program as well. They will discuss key CCUS research, development, and demonstration projects, commercial deployment trends, engagement strategies, and how policy and business drivers impact the field. RECS 2024 local partners and hosts include the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources and NETL, as well as ION Clean Energy, Basin Electric Power Cooperative, Western Fuels-Wyoming, Inc., Wyoming Integrated Test Center, and Charm Industrial.

To apply, applicants should be graduate students or early career professionals with backgrounds in geology, chemistry, engineering, natural sciences, hydrology, physics, business, communications, and related fields. Enrollment is limited to 32 participants and is tuition free. A travel stipend is available for students. 

RECS 2024 is scheduled for July 21-30, 2024 in Colorado and Wyoming. The deadline to apply is May 15, 2024. Visit the  RECS website for more information and to apply.

FECM minimizes environmental and climate impacts of fossil fuels and industrial processes while working to achieve net-zero emissions across the U.S. economy. Priority areas of technology work include carbon capture, carbon conversion, carbon dioxide removal, carbon dioxide transport and storage, hydrogen production with carbon management, methane emissions reduction, and critical minerals production. To learn more, visit the  FECM website ,  sign up  for FECM news announcements, and visit the  NETL website .