Seminar: Studies in Climate Impacts: Process, Propagation, and Preparedness

Abstract

In this seminar I will introduce a set of projects that all engage in some way with challenges of extreme climate events. First, I will present studies in which we apply statistical analysis, remote sensing, and dynamically-based models to characterize flash droughts in the United States. Our goal is to develop a predictive understanding of how vegetation-mediated processes contribute to the onset and intensification of these rapid drought events. Next, I will describe a set of projects in which we link hydroclimate modeling to an economically-based food systems model. The purpose of these studies is to move from a biophysical understanding of climate impacts to a network-based understanding of how a food production shock like a severe drought can propagate through markets to affect human outcomes across a food system. The geographic focus of these studies is Ethiopia. Finally, I will offer an overview of the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC) Urban Integrated Field Lab. BSEC is a partnership of researchers and community members working to generate the climate science needed for equitable climate action. As such, it takes physically-based understanding of climate processes along with systems models of the human impacts of climate change—that is, the kinds of research addressed in the first two-thirds of this seminar—and embeds them in a co-designed participatory decision framework that we hope will provide a new approach to collective climate preparedness across the city.