Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Exploring The Potential Impacts Of Climate Change On North America's Laurentian Great Lakes Tourism Sector, Natalie Chin

Open Access Dissertations

Climate change is one of the major challenges facing the global hospitality and tourism sector in the coming century and, given the important role that weather and climate play in all aspects of the tourism experience, tourism businesses owners need to start thinking about and enacting climate change adaptation strategies now. This work has utilized a combination of social science and physical science methods to (1) understand how the Great Lakes tourism sector could be impacted by climate change and (2) provide some insights into how researchers can help business owners prepare for these potential impacts. Overall, the results of …

An Examination Of Geographic Patterns Of Soil Climate And Its Classification In The U.S. System Of Soil Taxonomy, Hans Edwin Winzeler

Open Access Dissertations

Soil climate, the record of temporal patterns of soil moisture and temperature, is an important component of the structure of U.S. Soil Taxonomy. The U.S. Soil Survey has used the Newhall Simulation Model (NSM) for estimating soil climate from atmospheric climate records at weather stations since the 1970s. The current soil climate map of the U.S. was published in 1994 by using NSM runs from selected weather stations along with knowledge-based hand-drawn mapping procedures. We developed a revised soil climate mapping methodology using the NSM and digital soil mapping techniques.

The new methodology is called Grid Element Newhall Simulation Model …

Evolutionary Potential Of A Dispersal-Restricted Species In Response To Climate Change, Lorena Torres Martinez

Open Access Dissertations

Habitat replacement and fragmentation associated with projected climate change pose a critical threat to global biodiversity. Edaphically limited plant species with restricted dispersal abilities will be especially handicapped to track their optimal climate spatially. Instead, the persistence of these species will depend on their capacity to adapt in situ to novel climate regimes. Here I evaluated the evolutionary potential of Lasthenia fremontii, an annual plant species restricted to ephemeral wetlands called vernal pools in California to adapt to the projected patterns of climate change. Across L. fremontii distribution there is a latitudinal gradient in precipitation which, combined with reduced …

Crop Modeling For Assessing And Mitigating The Impacts Of Extreme Climatic Events On The Us Agriculture System, Zhenong Jin

Open Access Dissertations

The US agriculture system is the world’s largest producer of maize and soybean, and typically supplies more than one-third of their global trading. Nearly 90% of the US maize and soybean production is rainfed, thus is susceptible to climate change stressors such as heat waves and droughts. Process-based crop and cropping system models are important tools for climate change impact assessments and risk management. As data- science is becoming a new frontier for agriculture growth, the incoming decade calls for operational platforms that use hyper-local growth monitoring, high-resolution real-time weather and satellite data assimilation and cropping system modeling to help …

Climate Change And Hazardous Convective Weather In The United States: Insights From High-Resolution Dynamical Downscaling, Kimberly A. Hoogewind

Open Access Dissertations

Global climate model (GCM) projections increasingly suggest that large-scale environmental conditions favorable for hazardous convective weather (HCW) may increase in frequency in the future due to anthropogenic climate change. However, this storm environment-based approach is undoubtedly limited by the assumption that convective-scale phenomena will be realized within these environments. The spatial resolution of GCMs remains much too coarse to adequately represent the scales at which severe convective storms occur, including processes that may lead to storm initiation. With the advancement of computing resources, however, it has now become feasible to explicitly represent deep convective storms within a high-resolution regional climate …