Join us for a guest seminar on Wednesday, 02 July 2014.

Where: Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Studio 5, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town.

When: Wednesday, 02 July 2014 @ lunch time (13h00-14h00)

'The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) : Activities and Results' by Alex Ruane (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, USA)
 
The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) is a major international effort linking the climate, crop, and economic modeling communities with cutting-edge information technology to produce improved crop and economic models and the next generation of climate impact projections for the agricultural sector. Currently, AgMIP has over 650 participants from more than 50 countries contributing their expertise to over 30 projects and activities (see overview figure below). The goals of AgMIP are to improve substantially the characterization of world food security due to climate change and to enhance adaptation capacity in both developing and developed countries. Analyses of the agricultural impacts of climate variability and change require a transdisciplinary effort to consistently link state-of-the-art climate scenarios to crop and economic models with a strong grounding in observations of current agricultural systems around the world. Climate, crop model, livestock, economics, and information technology protocols are used to guide coordinated AgMIP research activities around the world, including a recent assessment focusing on Southern Africa with collaborators from several institutions across South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, and Lesotho.
This presentation will highlight recent AgMIP results from the local to global scale, demonstrating how community efforts are leading to new, more robust assessments of climate change impacts on food security and the wider agricultural sector.

BIO: Dr. Alex Ruane is a Research Physical Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an adjunct Associate Research Scientist at the Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research in New York City.  Alex serves as the Research Coordinator and Climate Team Leader for the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP; www.agmip.org), an international, transdisciplinary project connecting climate science, crop modeling, and economic modeling to place regional agricultural impacts of climate change into their global economic context to assess uncertainties, vulnerability, and world food security. 

Alex’s research uses a variety of climate and impacts assessment models to examine the influence of climate variability and change on a variety of sectors including agriculture, water resources, urban areas, infrastructure, energy, and human health, leading to the development of adaptation strategies and decision support tools for stakeholders and policy makers who need to understand vulnerabilities and uncertainties to successfully manage risk.   Alex leads the Coordinated Climate-Crop Modeling Project (C3MP; www.agmip.org./c3mp) in its investigations of climate sensitivity at more than 1000 worldwide crop and livestock simulation sets, and has developed the AgMERRA climate forcing dataset to support agricultural impacts modeling.  Alex also works to develop new methods to tailor climate scenarios for unique applications around the world, and investigates observational methods, high-frequency variations, and extreme characteristics of hydroclimate.  

Alex conducted his doctoral work studying the water cycle in the climate group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and received a B.S. in atmospheric science at Cornell University.