Project to develop computational tools for coupled human-natural systems

Participants from multiple universities, including Penn State, attend the kickoff meeting at Stanford University to discuss the $20 million, five-year project with the U.S. Department of Energy. UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. A $20 million, five-year project with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) looks to create a state-of-the-art framework of computational tools that will help to assess the impacts of weather-related variability and change. Penn State is one of two lead institutions on the project and will receive half of the funding. Stanford University is the other. According to Karen Fisher-Vanden, the project's co-director and professor of environmental and resource economics in the College of Agricultural Sciences, models are typically operated independently of one another. This project looks to integrate multiple existing models to capture important energy-water-land interactions and feedbacks between the natural and human systems.