Different Disciplines Join Forces in Center on Global Change

 

At Duke's Center on Global Change, Susan Lozier and her scientific colleagues were thinking very big: the climate of the entire North Atlantic Ocean.

Her group's interest was sparked by signs that parts of the North Atlantic were growing cooler, but that much more of the ocean was growing warmer. To assess what these changes portend, Lozier, a Duke physical oceanographer, had joined with a statistical climatologist and a biological oceanographer from Duke, a computer scientist from Research Triangle Park, and a climate modeler from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

To what extent, they asked, are the seas serving as storage reservoirs for the excess heat produced by global warming -- due to atmospheric carbon dioxide trapping the sun's heat in a "greenhouse effect?" How do these changes in heat storage affect the ocean's ability to store or "take up" carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? And where and how are these changes in the heat and carbon storage manifest in the ocean basins?

Supported by a competitive grant funded by the Center on Global Change, last spring Lozier's group began to pool its knowledge and expertise in search of fresh insights into the ocean's role in the global climate system.

The Center on Global Change, begun last year as a university-wide initiative and headquartered at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, has received an initial $1.5 million from the provost's office to fund interdisciplinary "working groups" of scientists as they tackle such complex problems.

The center's mission statement notes that "global changes, ranging from greenhouse warming and sea level rise to shifts in land use and urbanization, will affect the flow of ecosystem goods and services and pose fundamental, yet tractable, challenges for basic research in environmental science."

The mission statement adds that "global change scientists are poised to meet these challenges, but they require new collaborations among faculty, new ways of interacting across disciplines, and a program of graduate training that is broad, flexible and more cross-disciplinary than our traditional models."

The center's first working group, in spring 2002, was headed by Jim Clark, Duke's H.L. Blomquist Professor of Biology, and included other biologists, environmental scientists, computer scientists and statisticians who met to evaluate the use of statistical methods that might improve forecasts of potential ecological changes.

The second working group, in fall 2002, was headed by Duke associate professor of civil and environmental engineering John Albertson, who studies how land and atmosphere interact. He joined forces with a forest ecologist, a hydrologist and an applied mathematician to develop numerical models describing the transport of water and carbon through the environment.

"There are so many issues in global change, we thought that instead of trying to support a single research project the best way to go about this would be to allow faculty here to propose timely projects that are interdisciplinary," said Clark, who is also the center's faculty director.

Interdisciplinary projects can be "hard to get funded at the outset," Clark added. "So what we're trying to do is jump-start some of these broad interdisciplinary global change investigations by fostering them at the earliest stages."

Barbara Braatz, an oceanographer who left her job as a climate policy consultant in Washington, D.C., to become the center's executive director, is soliciting additional financial support. "We fund working groups of faculty and research scientists, including some from outside Duke, who come together for a semester to refine their questions and push their research forward," Braatz said. Each group's research proposal is selected on a competitive basis.

Lozier, who is the Truman and Nellie Semans Associate Professor of Physical Oceanography at the Nicholas School, headed the most recent working group.

"Our group is primarily trying to understand the role of the oceans as a heat and carbon reservoir, and how that role is changing as the climate is changing," she said. "We wanted to do this under the auspices of the Center on Global Change because the work demands a strong interdisciplinary effort."

Besides seeking further funding from outside Duke, participants also pooled their knowledge to teach an oceans and climate course for graduate students from different departments and schools. The center, which encourages such teaching opportunities, also sponsors between 10 and 12 seminars a year, during which visiting speakers can interact with students and faculty.

Recently, the center relocated from rented space in Durham's Brightleaf Square to the first floor of the Nicholas School's wing of the Levine Science Research Center. At the new location, researchers will have a little less space than at Brightleaf, but gain easier access to colleagues. They will continue to share offices, computing facilities, and a seminar room.

Over the next academic year, new center working groups will study various effects on the coastline of rising sea levels and the ecological impacts of planting trees in monocultural groupings known as forest plantations.