Research

I am most interested in the part of the atmosphere in which we live--right at Earth's surface.

The exchanges of energy, carbon, and water are important for the welfare of ecosystems, yet their complexities make them difficult to quantify, and even more difficult to predict how they might change in the future.

Members of the Twine Research Group are currently working on the following topics:

Urban Heat Islands

Most cities are warming at twice the rate of outlying areas. With 3.5 billion people calling urban areas home, the build environment can exacerbate heat waves, pollution can impact human health, and excess energy consumption can cost billions of dollars. We are currently investigating the simulated cooling effect of white roofs, vegetation, and other strategies, through fine-scale regional climate modeling . We are also collecting hourly air temperature & relative humidity measurements from sensors around the Twin Cities Metro Region to analyze how energy usage within census blocks correspond to ambient air temperature, and how urban street trees cool their environment.

Climate Change in Minnesota

Minnesota's winters are warming at a rate faster than any other state, but climate change is causing a warming in all four seasons. While we work to mitigate this warming, we will need to adapt to more extreme rainfall, less snow cover, and more frequent periods of very hot days. We are analyzing downscaled global climate models to project what Minnesota's future climate might look like. We have a dataset of two emissions scenarios from the CMIP5 suite of models, and are working on downscaling the latest CMIP6 suite.

In addition, we are working with the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB) Association and NOAA to evaluate flooding and drought and help support climate resiliency in this region.

Climate Change and Agroecosystems

Because agroecosystems cover nearly 40% of the global land surface, their response to environmental drivers like climate variability and land use change is just as important as those of forests and grasslands, perhaps more so as these ecosystems not only provide services like habitats and climate regulation, they also feed our growing population. We are working to better represent these ecosystems in climate models in order to most accurately predict how crop yields will change with time, but also how these ecosystems impact local and regional climate.