Bowling Green , Ky. - A special issue of the international journal Global and Planetary Change has been edited by Dr. Rezaul Mahmood, associate professor of Geography and Geology and associate director of the Kentucky Climate Center at Western Kentucky University.
With co-editors Dr. Roger Pielke of Colorado State and Dr. Kenneth Hubbard of Nebraska, Dr. Mahmood organized a group of 12 research papers contributed by scholars and students from around the world, including Israel, Japan, the Netherlands and Australia, to address the relationships between climate and land cover use and change.
The objective of Global and Planetary Change is to promote an interdisciplinary perspective on the causes, processes and limits of variability in planetary change. The journal focuses on the record of earth history changes and on an analysis and prediction of recent and future changes. Details of the special issue are available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09218181
For this special issue, Dr. Mahmood co-authored a paper on the “Impacts of irrigation on 20th century temperature in the northern Great Plains” with undergraduate student Travis Keeling (now pursuing graduate studies in the atmospheric sciences at Florida State University), graduate geoscience student Ronnie Leeper of Bowling Green and graduate student Christy Carlson from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Stuart Foster, director of the Kentucky Mesonet and the Kentucky Climate Center, and Dr. Ken Hubbard, High Plains Regional Climate Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, also contributed to the paper. Their research demonstrated that cooler average temperatures resulted from irrigated agricultural land in the northern Great Plains compared to average temperatures recorded for other types of land use.
This special issue edited by Dr. Mahmood and his colleagues contributes to the wider debate about global climate change and the impacts of various kinds of land-use changes around the planet. With the development of the Kentucky Mesonet, and ongoing collaboration between the Kentucky Climate Center and research centers around the country and across the globe, new data are being generated that will help scientists to better understand the implications of climate change for Kentucky communities.
This research also provides wonderful opportunities for student engagement in a wide variety of activities beyond the traditional classroom, including climate modeling, site analysis for data collection, and the interpretation of land use changes.
According to Geography and Geology Department Head Dr. David Keeling, “the kinds of research that Dr. Mahmood and Dr. Foster are conducting have great potential for future student engagement in a wide variety of activities. Students will be able to use new types of meteorological instrumentation, have access to data sets not previously available, and will be able to work on climate change problems that have great significance for local communities and for the entire region.”
Research and internship opportunities are available for both undergraduate and graduate students in the Kentucky Climate Center and with the Kentucky Mesonet.
More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.
For information, contact Dr. Rezaul Mahmood at (270) 745-5979.
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