
NSF Org: |
AGS Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences |
Recipient: |
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Initial Amendment Date: | August 3, 2010 |
Latest Amendment Date: | June 23, 2014 |
Award Number: | 0955372 |
Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
Program Manager: |
Ming Cai
AGS Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
Start Date: | September 1, 2010 |
End Date: | August 31, 2017 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $743,639.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $743,639.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2011 = $148,422.00 FY 2012 = $154,876.00 FY 2013 = $159,991.00 FY 2014 = $166,842.00 |
History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
615 W 131ST ST NEW YORK NY US 10027-7922 (212)854-6851 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
Rt 9W Palisades NY US 10964 |
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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Parent UEI: |
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NSF Program(s): | Climate & Large-Scale Dynamics |
Primary Program Source: |
01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001314DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001213DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001011DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
Program Reference Code(s): |
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Program Element Code(s): |
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Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
Anthropogenic climate change is expected to affect vulnerable "less-developed" societies with greater severity, yet it is in the tropics where these societies are located that projections of change, especially of regional precipitation change, suffer from the greatest uncertainty. The goals of this project are: (1) to advance understanding of the physical processes that cause uncertainty in model projections in semi-arid regions of the tropics such as the African Sahel, and (2) to exchange knowledge with community organizations and public schools in the Columbia University neighborhood, a historically African-American neighborhood with a sizable West African/Sahelian immigrant population.
The research component adopts the moist static energy framework to guide scientific advancement through three project phases: (a) diagnosis of the divergence in model projections of regional rainfall change, (b) characterization of the interaction of the observed diurnal cycle of precipitation with cloud-radiative processes at a Sahelian site, and (c) investigation of the sensitivity of model projections to parameterizations of convection, clouds and radiation. The first two phases rely solely on statistical data analysis, of model output and observations respectively. The third requires running and analyzing model simulations.
The educational component revolves around two phases: (a) consolidation of an interdisciplinary graduate-level course on "Climate change in Africa" through outreach aimed at discussing perceptions of change and implications of scientific uncertainty for policy and practice in community forums, (b) curricular development on the science of climate change from an environmental justice perspective to teach climate change to under-represented students in the Earth sciences, and involve them in research.
The investigator plans to reconcile and transcend contrasting views of regional variability and change, which have in the past emphasized local land-atmosphere interaction or remote oceanic influences. In the moist static energy framework, these influences can be directly related to the local energy budget, hence to perturbations imposed by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. This process-based characterization of the causes of uncertainty connects to basic physical principles whose workings can be observed daily, and aids in the discussion of scientific results with the broader community, including high-school students. In sum, with the support of graduate, undergraduate and high school students, this project will advance climate change research, improve effective communication of its results to the broader community, and begin to educate a generation of environmentally conscious citizens.
Broader impacts of the proposed research are primarily educational and in the potential to reduce the uncertainty in projections of climate change in semi-arid regions of the tropics, which has implications for policy and for practice.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
I write as a scientist at a research university with an adjunct teaching appointment. As I report on salient outcomes, I wish to contribute to making the case that the CAREER program is beneficial to non-traditional Principal Investigators [PI’s] in my position. 5 years of early-career support to give direction to research in a way that the typical succession of 3-year projects does not allow, and to integrate research and education beyond what is strictly required by an adjunct appointment, were a professional lifeline. This support allowed me to stay connected to basic research while seeking relevance to the applied mission of the institute that employs me within the university. It facilitated participation in conferences: scientific and at the policy boundary, domestic and international. And it shaped me into an advisor to graduate students, and a responsible manager and coordinator of a complex project.
The research component of this project hinged on my prior work, which had conclusively attributed late 20th century drought in the Sahel, the semi-arid southern edge of the Sahara Desert made infamous by drought-induced famines in the 1970s and 1980s, to subtle changes in the surface temperature of the global oceans. Highlighting the role of warming of the tropical oceans in drought, it brought on the quintessential attribution question: might it be possible to attribute Sahel drought to emissions from fossil fuel burning? I pursued indirect attribution, i.e., through the influence of emissions on sea surface temperatures. In a 2013 article, colleagues from West African institutions and I sketched how thermodynamic [climate change] and dynamical [climate variability and predictability] arguments might be coherently synthesized [Figure 1]. These boiled down the role of the oceans in two ingredients. The first one is warming of the remote oceans, which raises the threshold for the convective instability needed for precipitation. The second is warming of the local ocean, which supplies the moisture that allows to meet the threshold. In the case of the Sahel these roles are played respectively by the Indian and Pacific, and by the North Atlantic Oceans. Graduate students supported by this project added novel detail to pathways of oceanic influence on continental climates, describing physical processes responsible for setting up environmental conditions that may favor or inhibit precipitation. One student dissected El Niño as an analogue in climate change. He analyzed daily rainfall observations in two prototypical regions of sub-Saharan Africa, one characterized by drought during the growth phase, the other by excessive rains during the mature phase of El Niño. He showed how warming of upper tropospheric temperatures raises the threshold for convective instability, and leads to a reduction in frequency of rainy days in the first region/phase, while near-surface moisture convergence from an adjacent warmed up ocean compensates for the higher threshold, and leads to an increase in frequency in the other region/phase. The other student revisited processes of Sahel rainfall variability from a moisture budget approach. She confirmed the expectation that dynamical, i.e., atmospheric circulation changes, have dominated historical variation on interannual and multi-decadal time scales: a weakened monsoon circulation is defined by the reduction of moisture and mass convergence. In-depth analyses of the multi-model ensembles of simulations produced in support of the 4th and 5th Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change brought to light improvements in the reproduction of observed features of the oceans’ influence on Sahelian climate associated with a more realistic description of convective instability. These ultimately paved the way for attribution of drought to the unique late 20th century combination of greenhouse gases, and of aerosols from human emissions of circum-North Atlantic origin, compounded by aerosols from episodic volcanic eruptions [Figure 2]. Drought in the Sahel thus resulted from greenhouse gases warming the global tropical oceans, which raised the threshold for convective instability, and began to emerge at the same time that aerosols cooled the North Atlantic, weakening moisture supply.
Despite the relevance of these final research results, it is possible that the most lasting impact will be that of the educational component: the development and implementation of a curriculum to teach climate change from an interdisciplinary, climate justice, solutions-oriented perspective, publicly available at https://fdacourse.iri.columbia.edu/. This curriculum was piloted at Frederick Douglass Academy, a public high school in Harlem, where it is offered as an elective in the Science department. In addition to bringing cutting-edge research into the classroom, the curriculum is designed to teach quantitative data analysis skills using research-grade data, from NASA and NOAA, to a student body which is primarily composed of under-represented minorities in STEM disciplines, and engages students to think about the connection between local and global through exploration of the origin and physical impact of the same atmospheric constituents that are behind the asthma epidemic in their upper Manhattan neighborhood, and drought in the Sahel, namely, aerosols.
Last Modified: 12/05/2017
Modified by: Alessandra Giannini
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