Research Spotlight

The Great Lakes are an epicenter for power production, commerce, recreation, and so much more, but research suggests that they are also becoming a hotbed for climate change. In fact, research from the past two decades has shown intense weather extremes and fluctuations in the area, a trend Michael Notaro, associate director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climatic Research (CCR), will help to investigate through a three-year grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) Program.

A prestigious grant program, MAPP supports research that seeks to understand climate variability and change and improve models and tools used to prepare communities for climate impacts. As a part of this grant, Notaro will be investigating a pool of global coupled atmosphere-ocean-land models within the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase Six (CMIP6) High Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP).  Specifically, Notaro will be studying the effectiveness of the tool itself as well as how it can be used or improved to further the understanding of lake-atmosphere interactions including lake-effect snowstorms.