Research Projects

Climate-to-Humans

A study of urbanized coastal environments, their economics and vulnerability to climate change.

In this NSF-sponsored project, which is in collaboration with colleagues at Rutgers University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, we are developing a unified framework for studying global change in the Earth System allowing for scale interactions (up/down-scaling) and explicitly modeled dynamic feedbacks between the sub-components. We have been building an Earth System Model (ESM) that couples multi-scale ocean, atmosphere, watershed, biogeochemistry, and human system models. The projected variability of the coupled environmental and human systems, represented with bioeconomic and social network models, is being used to study management and other socio-economic decisions affecting future sustainable practices and the long-term evolution of the Earth System. The target for this study is the northeast U.S., a highly urbanized and densely populated region with 33% of the U.S. population and host to one the world’s largest economies. It is also a region where vulnerability to global change is heightened, with the likelihood for experiencing significant climate and ecosystem changes, shifting land use, and a complex western boundary current oceanic regime with significant implications for the northern hemisphere climate.