Utah Climate Center receives $141,000
USU professors secured a $141,000 grant from the U.S. Bureau of Water Reclamation, funded by the Water SMART Grants Program. The money will be used for conducting research and developing new tools for long-term climate projections.
Climate projection is different from weather forecasting and is still a relatively imperfect science, said Robert Gillies, director of the Utah Climate Center. With this new grant, he said he hopes to create more effective analysis methods.
“This is not only going to affect students,” Gillies said. “Everyone needs to know where they get their water from. The climate affects agriculture, tourism, natural resources — everything.”
Gillies is a native of Scotland but expressed concern about future climates here in Utah.
“According to the research, Utah is in for some changes,” he said.
Gillies said the Cache Valley should get a lot more rain in the near future and less snow. Southern Utah, however, is projected to have less precipitation in general.
“Utah is heating up much faster than the global average,” said Shih-Yu Wang, assistant professor in the department of plants, soils and climate. “But until now, no one has really developed accurate climate prediction models for the Intermountain West region. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change predictions have a lot of inaccuracies. They ignore a lot of variables.”
With the new grant money, Wang said the center hopes to pay greater attention to detail in its climate prediction models, while forecasting with greater confidence.
“With this grant, we hope to create accurate models of what the future weather in Utah will be like — temperature, precipitation and humidity,” Gillies said. “There will be a lot of work to do, and there will be student internship opportunities.”
Gillies teaches aviation weather and climate change at USU and hopes to find many of the student-interns to work on the project in his classes, he said. He said it’s important for students to get involved and pay attention to global climate change, because it affects everyone whether they realize it or not.
The research could prove to be vital, especially in at-risk areas for desertification and drought. All of the findings will be publicized on the client center website, Gillies said. With accurate data, managers in at-risk areas can create management systems to meet their needs with a timetable of what to expect in the future. He said he hopes his team’s research will be used in preparing such areas for water shortages. The primary mission of the Utah Climate Center is to facilitate access to climate data and information for average people as well as the researcher, he added.
The center is located in the Janet Quinney Lawson Building. The facility is small, Gillies said, but the implications behind its research has great magnitude.
“Once we have really accurate data, students will be able to use that invaluable information in research projects,” he said. “Climate projection journals are useful for students in almost every major and research topic.”
The grant application process is highly competitive, with labs and universities across the nation vying for funding, according to Gillies.
“Presumably, because we simply fit all the specifications. We were the best of the applicants. It sounds rather self-centered, but it is the truth I guess,” he added.
Wang said the center and its staff have received grants in the past but none so large. The money benefits not only the facility but the researchers and the community as well.
Marty Booth, a graduate student and meteorologist at the Climate Center, said, “We do a lot more than just climate prediction. We are a research and service center. We travel to elementary schools. We try to make meteorological data easy for the public to understand, which is more than most research centers do.”
– evan.millsap@aggiemail.usu.edu