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
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, and the University of Colorado at Boulder
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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
 CIRES Researchers Collaborate on Answer to Basic Atmospheric Chemistry Question
CIRES Center Offers Reassessed National Flood Damage Estimates
Drought/Flooding Findings
Researchers at the Climate Diagnostics Center
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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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Featured Collaborations
 The CIRES/NOAA Western Water Assessment 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.
Center for Science and Technology Policy Research
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. The Center collaborated with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to offer reassessed national flood damage estimates. Other Center activities involve evaluating the relationship between societal needs and science and technology policy. The Center's Atmospheric Sciences Policy Education and Network (ASPEN) focuses on weather policy research, education, and outreach. The Flatirons Outdoor Classroom is a 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. A Center symposium in 2002 titled, "Science, Technology, and Security: Knowledge for the Post-9/11 World" 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.
CIRES-NOAA Collaborations
Posters presented at the 2002 NOAA Review included cooperative institute collaborations on Climate Variability on the North Slope, Carbon Cycle and Greenhouse Gases, and Research to Reconstruct Colorado Streamflow from Tree Rings.
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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Education Collaborations
 CIRES Outreach Brings Science into Wider Community
 CIRES Scientists Awarded $1.5 Million for Science Education
Science Education Products
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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