Collaborations among CRCES, Texas A & M University (TAMU), and University of Maryland – Baltimore County (UMBC) in the MRB projects have facilitated the involvement of 21 Ph.D. and undergraduate students in CRCES’s MRB projects since 2011. Professors Bruce McCarl (TAMU) and Amita Mehta (UMBC) have guided these student activities. Important details of the students’ research and training are given here.
Ph.D. Dissertations
Ding, J., 2014: Climate Variability, Water and Agricultural Production. Ph. D. Dissertation, Texas A & M Univ., College Station, Texas.
Fernandez, M., 2013: Decadal Climate Variability: Economic Implications in Agriculture and Water in the Missouri River Basin. Ph. D. Dissertation, Texas A & M Univ., College Station, Texas.
Huang, P., 2014: Economic and Societal Implications of Decadal Climate Variability and Fishery Management. Ph. D. Dissertation, Texas A & M Univ., College Station, Texas.
Jithitikulchai, T., 2014: Decadal Climate Variability Impacts on Crop Distributions. Ph. D. Dissertation, Texas A & M Univ., College Station, Texas.
Popuri, Saikumar, 2017 (expected): Bayesian and an Expectation – Maximization – Like Estimation of a Tobit State-space Model for Daily Precipitation. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Maryland – Baltimore County, Catonsville, Maryland.
Undergraduate Training in Climate Research
Under the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), hosted by the Interdisciplinary Program in High Performance Computing at UMBC (http://hpcreu.umbc.edu/), 16 undergraduate students were involved in CRCES’s MRB projects in the last three summers. These students worked on various aspects of the MRB projects in analyzing hydro-meteorological data from four global Earth System Models (ESMs) run under the World Climate Research Program’s Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project 5, developing statistical techniques to downscale the ESMs’ hydro-meteorological data using parallel computing, and developing a web portal for interactive analysis and visualization of the data. Through the REU program, the MRB projects have been instrumental in exposing these undergraduate researchers to complexities of climate modeling, and in training them in climate data processing and analysis. Project titles, student names, and brief summaries of their projects are given here.
2014
Project: A GUI for Visualization and Preparing GCM Data for Use in SWAT
Student Team: Christopher Evans, Abigail Gartrell, Lauren Gomez, Moise Mouyebe., and Darius Oxley
http://hpcreu.umbc.edu/summer2014/projects/team2/
2015
Project: Assessing Decadal Climate Impacts on Water Resources within Missouri River Sub-Basins
Student Team: Christopher Evans, Abigail Gartrell, Lauren Gomez, Moise Mouyebe, and Darius Oxley
http://hpcreu.umbc.edu/summer2015/projects/team2/
2016
Project: Using Historical Data for Retrospective Prediction of Rainfall In the Midwest
Student Team: Ephraim Alfa, Huiyi Chen, Kristen Hansen, and Mathew Prindle
http://hpcreu.umbc.edu/summer2016/projects/team1/
Project: Enhanced Data Exploration and Visualization Tool for Large Spatio-Temporal Climate Data
Student Team: Ethan Crasto, Sydney Kahmann, Paula Rodriguez, and Benjamin Smith
http://hpcreu.umbc.edu/summer2016/projects/team2/
Project: Dimensionality Reduction Using Sliced Inverse Regression in Modeling Large Climate Data Student Team: Ross Flieger-Allison, Lois Miller, Danielle Sykes, and Pablo Valle
http://hpcreu.umbc.edu/summer2016/projects/team3/