N.C. university gets $1.8M to predict climate change

N.C. State University researchers are part of a team working to predict potential consequences of climate change and to better predict hurricanes and rain patterns.

The National Science Foundation has provided $10 million over five years to use climate data collected by satellites, ground-based sensors and physics-based simulations to gain a better understanding of climate change.

Of that funding, $1.8 million is going to NCSU researchers Fred Semazzi and Nagiza Samatova.

Semazzi, a professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, will work to improve the prediction of Atlantic hurricanes through advanced computational techniques. "The underlying hypothesis is that there may be hidden nuggets of knowledge within climate data sets, which may complement traditional physics-based insights," Semazzi says.

Samatova, a computer science professor at NC State and a joint faculty appointee at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will work to develop data analyzing tools and algorithms to improve the accuracy of climate forecasts. "We also hope to tap into high-performance computing technologies to improve the response time for these climate models," Samatova says. "This should allow climate researchers to analyze data, and explore more hypotheses, much more quickly."

Read more in the Triangle Business Journal.