UMass Amherst to Host $7.5 Million Climate Science Center

UMass Amherst has been awarded a major grant to host the $7.5 million Northeast Climate Science Center (CSC).

The announcement was made today in Washington DC by the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar.

The Principal Investigator is Professor Richard Palmer, who is also the Chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UMass Amherst. The Co-Principal Investigator is Professor Raymond Bradley, a renowned climate scientist. This is the eighth climate science center established since 2009.

We had the pleasure of hearing Professor Palmer speak when he spoke in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series in Fall 2009. I heard Professor Bradley speak in the Daffodil Lectures on Sustainability and the Environment at UMass at which Andrew Revkin of the NYTimes also spoke.

In addition to UMass Amherst, other Northeast CSC members are: the University of Wisconsin Madison, University of Missouri Columbia, University of Minnesota, the College of Menominee Nation in Keshena, Wis., the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass. and Columbia University in New York City.

The full press release can be read here.

Specific research challenges that this center may be involved in could include climate impacts on water resources, agriculture and grazing, fish and wildlife and responses to climate change, forest resilience, invasive species, protecting migratory fish and waterfowl, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, flood management and water quality.

This is terrific news and given all the research accomplishments that UMass Amherst has had in sustainability and the environment, well-deserved.

The Boston Globe has some nice coverage of this news along with a list of the other CSCs in the US.