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Johannes J. Feddema Office Hours: R 9:30-12:30 or by appt.
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My primary research focuses on the study of natural and human induced climate change, and the impacts of these changes on human and environmental systems. I developed this interest early in life, growing up on three continents and seeing the impacts of climate and environmental degradation first hand in vastly different communities.
At the outset of my research career I used water balance models to simulate human impacts on climate and water resources, including the effects of land-use change and human induced soil degradation. More recently I have expanded this work, through collaboration with researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), to introduce human surface impacts into two NCAR global circulation models (GCMs). In this NSF and NCAR funded work I developed global datasets and helped modify NCAR’s Parallel Climate Model (PCM) to simulate historical and future anthropogenic land cover change impacts on climate. Some of our results can be viewed through the links below. Presently, the NCAR Community Climate System Model (CCSM) is being modified so that it can run transient land cover simulations for the first time using my land cover change datasets. We are also introducing an urban canyon sub-model for the CCSM. For this work I am creating datasets to represent urban extent and urban properties on a global scale. I have proposed projects to simulate global impacts of urbanization, and I am developing several different future urban change scenarios (e.g. sprawl and climate mitigation schemes) to evaluate the impacts of urban systems on climate. In the future I propose to simulate climate impacts due to human soil degradation.
In other research work, I continue to use water balance modeling techniques to address a variety of research questions. These computationally less demanding models are proving an effective tool for climate impact assessment work, including impacts on agriculture, vegetation responses to climate, and as a calibration tool for drought detection with remote sensing techniques. I have also used a water balance model, in a joint project with computer scientists at the University of Kansas, to create a collaborative decision making tool in a visual immersion environment. We designed the system to assess mean climate changes, and also included several different ways of visualizing uncertainty in the models and data.
My extensive use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing products, spatial statistics and mapping, to build and visualize land cover change databases, has led to a secondary research interest in Geographic Information Science. I have become interested in using GIS to develop interactive systems that allow users to explore and analyze data more effectively. I am currently participating in a number of collaborative projects where I provide expertise in these technologies. For example, I lead the GIS component of the $19 Million Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, where we will be processing and visualizing radar data to assess ice sheet depth and dynamics. In the future we plan to develop better climate impact assessment tools that merge socio-economic data and climate projections to improve evaluation of climate impacts on specific regions and sectors of society.
More information can be found of these specific research topics:
| PCM experiments I: | Uncertainty in present day land cover and historical land cover change |
| PCM experiments II: | Future land cover change |
| Additional PCM weblinks: | http://whyfiles.org/shorties/192landuse_climate/ |
| Current work: | Development of transient land cover change datasets |
| Development of an urban model for the Community Climate Model |
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| CReSIS: | www.cresis.ku.edu |
