Acquisition of a Computational Laboratory for Regional, Interdisciplinary Investigation of Climatic and Environmental Change

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Under the Major Research Instrumentation program, a computational laboratory will be acquired that will facilitate and unite multidisciplinary research focused on regional climate change and the effects of that climate change on biologic, geochemical, sedimentologic, hydrologic, and societal systems. These topics involve faculty, researchers and students from 5 departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Earth Sciences, Ocean Sciences, Environmental Toxicology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Environmental Studies). Two main research avenues will be supported by this facility. First, a regional climate model will be utilized in investigations of future climate scenarios for key regions of interest. Second, the regional climate model results will be applied to a range of studies that focus on responses to climate change by various regional biologic (marginal marine ecosystems, marine algal blooms, terrestrial floral and fauna ecosystems), chemical (water quality, contaminant dispersal), hydrologic (surface and groundwater flow), sedimentologic (land slide and glacial hazards), and societal (water management) systems. The researchers will use an advanced regional climate model to investigate future climate change scenarios that include increasing levels of greenhouse gases and aerosols and for scenarios of projected future land use changes. Regional modeling cases will be carried out at model resolutions of 40, 30, and 20 km., to investigate effect of spatial resolution upon results. This project will provide a multidisciplinary and multidimensional view of the possible effects of future climate change at regional scales. The project will involve graduate and undergraduate students in research and computing projects, seek to engage underrepresented students in scientific research, and allow for the inclusion of results from this research to be incorporated into 18 different courses across 5 different departments.