Understanding Land Atmospheric Processes Across Scales
Research Pathways Linking Physical Modeling, Remote Sensing, and Large Scale Field Experiments

Our research Group's interests are to understand, characterize, measure, and model land surface and boundary layer processes with a particular emphasis on scale issues and remote sensing. Understanding of these processes is critical to diagnose and predict possible climate change due to natural and human induced factors, and assess the consequences of such a change for society and environment. Our research in this area has evolved by maintaining a close link between observational data analysis, theoretical, and modeling studies of various processes and feedbacks between land and atmosphere. Solutions for contemporary hydrologic and water resources problems require interdisciplinary perspectives and our group focuses on bringing together students and faculty from various water interfacing disciplines to provide the scientific information society needs to address these changes.

To make a fundamental contribution in the emerging area of Hydrometeorology, Hydroclimatology, and Ecohydrology it is critically important to have interdisciplinary partnership with faculty and students from hydrology interfacing discipline. With this goal in mind, I have established collaborative research linkages within Tufts University (School of Engineering, School of Arts and Sciences, and Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy), other Universities and National Labs (NASA, NOAA, Columbia University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pennsylvania State University). To enhance the vitality of my interdisciplinary research agenda, I continue to seek collaborative partnership with faculty and researchers outside USA as well. For example, my international partnership with MIT (USA), and BUET (Bangladesh) has been instrumental to initiate and sustain a multi-year, multidisciplinary research project to address arsenic contamination in India and Bangladesh. I am also acively involved with the South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies (SaciWATERs) which is committed to bring structural change in the dominant water resources management paradigm in South Asia.

Animation of Smoothed Daily ET Maps Designed by Le Jiang: le.jiang@noaa.gov