COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) is one of 16 partners in a new climate research project led by the University of Maryland called the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS).
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will provide up to $93 million over the next five years to support the project.
The new CICS will be directed from two principal locations: the first at the University of Maryland in College Park and the second at the NOAA’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, NC. North Carolina State University will be the lead institution for the North Carolina-based portion of the institute and RENCI will work closely with partners at NC State and NCDC on mining and visualizing exisiting NCDC data related to climate change.
“Establishing this Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites is a
major step forward in the NOAA-led effort to create a National Climate
Service that would provide longer-term forecasts and warnings related to
climate change, just as the National Weather Service does for storms and
other short term weather changes,” said University of Maryland climate
scientist Phillip Arkin, director of the new institute. “Our new
institute will combine satellite observations with advanced climate
change modeling to produce the kinds of services, like long-term
regional drought assessments, that such a climate service will provide.”
The new institute will play a major role in the University of Maryland’s.
In addition to NC State and NCDC, other partners in the CICS Consortium are Princeton University, Howard University, The University of California, Irvine, Columbia Universigty, the City University of New York, University of Miami (Florida), Colorado State University, Duke University, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Oregon State University, Remote Sensing Systems, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Additional capability for public and community outreach and engagement will be provide to CICS by partnerships with Climate Central in Princeton, the North Carolina Arboretum, and the Centers for Environmental and Climatic Interaction (CECI), a non-profit corporation representing Asheville community interests and organizations whose goal is to encourage the development of trusted climate change information and analysis for policymakers, government, businesses and the public.
For more on CICS, see the University of Maryland news release at http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=1902
