SPARC Collision Incubator

For Federal Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21), Congress appropriated $338,000,000 to the NOAA Laboratories and university-based Cooperative Institutes, the Climate Competitive Research program, and the Sea Grant College Program.

The potentially most significant NOAA FY21 appropriation opportunity for UMN is for a new Cooperative Institute (CI) focused on research and education on “water-related challenges.” This CI would receive at least $15,000,000 (likely over 5 years, but not specified) to “leverage talent and diversity from multiple universities to lead an interdisciplinary, systems-based research approach from mountains to tributaries, lakes and rivers, and ultimately to the coasts that will seed new and improved operational services for NOAA by improving our current understanding of the water cycle and our ability to observe and predict it.” Recommended disciplines for the new CI include:

● hydroinformatics and community water resources modeling

● geographic information systems and remote sensing, including snow depth and soil moisture

● coastal inundation modeling and forecasting in collaboration with the National Ocean Service

● data assimilation

● computational science and high performance computing

● artificial intelligence and machine learning

Congress also designated at least $13,000,000 of this funding for Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) research, which may be an opportunity for UMN. The University has numerous researchers conducting fresh water HAB-related work at SAFL, NRRI, MN Sea Grant, and Extension. Also included in this HAB-designated appropriation is “up to $2,000,000 to explore innovative methods to increase monitoring and detection of HABs in freshwater systems by partnering with a consortium of academic institutions with expertise in unmanned aircraft systems.” The specificity of the language indicates it may have been written with a particular recipient(s) in mind.

In this collision we will be discussing these upcoming funding opportunities toward identifying potential areas where UMN could prepare to submit proposals.