Dr. Leila Farhadi received a $500,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award for the project “Observation-Driven Mapping of the Linkages between the Terrestrial Water, Energy and Carbon Cycles.” The exchange of heat (energy), water, and carbon between the land and the atmosphere plays a key role in the Earth’s climate. Understanding the links between these cycles helps us explain how the environment will respond to changing conditions, including climate change and land use change. Currently the lack of proper representation of the linkages results in a wide range of uncertainties and variations in simulated climate projections. Dr. Farhadi will use a novel observation-driven approach to diagnose and map the linkages at regional scales from the implicit (hidden) information embedded in land surface state observations, available through space-borne remote sensing data. To learn more about the award, check out the NSF CAREER wikipedia page. More information about Dr. Farhadi's research can be found on her faculty page.
Learn more about Dr. Farhadi’s project in the GW Today article “Using Satellite Data to Improve Climate Models.”