Collaboration Features / Success Stories
Questions concerning the radiation budget and Earth's climate may involve any combination of glaciologists, climatologists, atmospheric scientists, biologists, chemists, and oceanographers, all of whom can blend their collective experience and knowledge of remote sensing to enrich our understanding. Moreover, decision makers and communities need scientific knowledge faster than ever before in history to inform policy and practice. Results concerning emissions that affect air and water quality cannot be pondered in the isolation of the ivory tower, but must be shared as soon as possible with the people whose lives they affect. Now more than ever before, natural resource managers need to partake of science research on an on-going basis, even as results evolve.
CIRES, NOAA
[ About NOAA ]
, and the University of Colorado at Boulder
[ About CU ]
have enjoyed many scientific successes during their collaboration, which now spans nearly four decades. For example, CIRES has played a key part in the University's successful Environmental Program and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. CIRES collaboration occurs at many levels from local (work with area schools, University
science partners, and local NOAA science
partners, to the state and regional level (water resources and drought),
to national (flood damage) and international level.
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Science Collaborations
CIRES Collaboration Uses Imaging to Find Expansive Soils
In summer 2002, CIRES Fellow Alexander Goetz, collaborated with colleagues from the Colorado School of Mines, the Colorado Geological Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey, in a study of one of the worst construction hazards along the Colorado's Front Range.
CIRES Researchers Collaborate on Answer to Basic Atmospheric Chemistry Question
 CIRES fellow Veronica Vaida collaborated with CIRES visiting fellows Henrik Kjaergaard from the University of Otago in New Zealand and Jamie Donaldson from the University of Toronto, and CIRES doctoral candidate Paul Hintze, to show how a fundamental molecular process driven by sunlight may play a significant role in determining the planet's energy budget.
Drought/Flooding Findings
Researchers at the Climate Diagnostics Center
[ About CDC ]
collaborated with scientists at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction on an investigation of the predictability of droughts and floods over the United States through large sets of General Circulation Model simulations. One of their studies focused on the central U.S. drought of summer 1988 and the floods of spring 1993, and the degree
to which they may have been influenced by anomalous SST conditions in the eastern tropical Pacific. They concluded the 1988 drought probably had little to do with the tropical SSTs, but the 1993 floods did.
How Tall is Tall?
In 1999, CIRES Fellow Roger Bilham and two of his students, David Mencin and Frederick Blume, were part of a team that included scientists supported by the National Geographic and Boston's Museum of Science, and scientists from the aerospace engineering sciences department of the University of Colorado, National Imagery and Mapping Agency of the United States, and the National Bureau of Surveying and Mapping of China, that determined the precise height of Mount Everest to be about seven feet higher than previously thought.
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CIRES Visiting Fellowships
This programs has provided research collaboration opportunities to dozens of environmental scientists and education researchers since its inception in 1967.
New England Air Quality Study
CIRES scientists collaborated with colleagues in NOAA and other organizations
on air quality prediction and monitoring, weather, and climate-related issues
in this study, which was designed to provide scientific information for environmental
decision makers in the region to aid in the development of effective strategies
for air quality management.
Education Collaborations
CIRES Outreach Brings Science into Wider Community
For the more than seven years, CIRES' Outreach program has linked CIRES researchers and the wider community by facilitating greater public understanding of environmental science through education.
CIRES Scientists Awarded $1.5 Million for Science Education
The National Science Foundation has granted $1.5 million to a team of CIRES and CU-Boulder scientists and graduate students who are working with the Boulder Valley School district on a program designed to improve science, math and literacy in area schools.
Collaborative Products
Science Education
CIRES researchers teamed up with scientists and scientific communications specialists with the paleoclimatology program of the National Climatic Data Center to produce the Climate TimeLine, an online tool that many have cited for excellence.
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Collaborating with Policy and Decision Makers
Western Water Assessment
CIRES established this program in 1998 to develop information, products and processes to assist water-resource decision makers throughout the Intermountain West. Western Water Assessment research engages scientists, decision makers, water resource managers, water users, and others. The list of WWA partners is impressive.
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Center for Science and Technology Policy Research |
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CIRES' Center for Science and Technology Policy Research assists decision makers with complex scientific problems and its staff have worked with others on wide-ranging issues such as water scarcity, global climate change, national security, and technology transfer. Read here how the Center collaborated with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to offer reassessed national flood damage estimates.
Learn more about how the Center activities are evaluating the relationship between societal needs and science and technology policy. For additional examples of center collaborations, see also the Atmospheric Sciences Policy Education and Network (ASPEN), which focuses on weather policy research, education, and outreach, or the Flatirons Outdoor Classroom, a K-12 curricular project and collaboration of the Center, the Boulder Valley School District, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the University of Colorado.
Center affiliates include long-term collaborators on issues of science and technology policy and colleagues in the University of Colorado system who share an interest in the subject. The list of Center visitors and collaborators is also long.
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A Center symposium in 2002 titled, "Science, Technology, and Security: Knowledge for the Post-9/11 World", sought to foster new connections and dialogue among decision makers and scientists. The Symposium brought together national and local experts to discuss topics such as computer security, bioterrorism, water security, support for homeland defense and emergency management.
In September 2004, the Center's "Carbon Cycle Science: Reconciling Supply and Demand" workshop brought together actors representing both supply and demand sectors of carbon cycle research, research administrators, and policy analysts to discuss and debate the findings of the white papers and to develop a recommendation for a research agenda and institutional structure that would enhance the ability of the North American Carbon Program Plan (NACP) to effectively reconcile supply and demand for carbon cycle information.
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CIRES-NOAA Collaborations
Posters presented at the most recent NOAA Review (2002) include cooperative institute collaborations on Climate Variability on the North Slope, Carbon Cycle and Greenhouse Gases, and Research to Reconstruct Colorado Streamflow from Tree Rings.
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Innovative Collaborations/Fertilization of Novel Ideas
Former CIRES Fellow and professor of geological sciences John Rundle joined Claudio Cioffi of the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder in a productive partnership. Their unlikely collaboration resulted in the mathematical modeling of behaviors that occur before the onset of earthquakes and the destablization of political systems even though they are clearly independent in nature. This work, titled "Exploring Nonlinear Dynamics of Extreme Events in Driven Threshold Systems," explored new approaches to modeling nonlinear dynamics of extreme events to derive fundamental results applicable to both geophysical and social systems.
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