Faculty across many departments at Purdue pursue research on issues of climate change and weather impacts in a myriad of ways; some key topics this research community pursues include:
Heat stress and weather impacts;
Climate change and biodiversity;
Climate and public health;
Climate smart agriculture;
Climate action and environmental justice
Climate Change Impact Assessments
Scientists and decision makers from across the state have worked together to develop a series of easily understandable reports that show how a changing climate will affect state and local interests. Led by Purdue’s Climate Change Research Center (now part of Purdue’s Institute for a Sustainable Future), the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA) provide the scientific research to help Hoosiers understand and prepare for the impacts of a changing climate.
The purpose aimed to identify the building blocks of risk that lie at the nexus of climate change (e.g., direct impacts, tipping points, geoengineering, mitigation and adaptation efforts), cybersecurity (e.g., AI/deep learning/quantum computing), critical physical infrastructure with an emphasis on food-energy-water (FEW) systems, and social systems with an emphasis on policy, legal frameworks, institutions, and migration. In bringing together experts from various fields of academia, government, and industry from NATO member and partner countries, they worked to identify gaps in our collective knowledge of risk that lay at the nexus of climate change, cybersecurity, and the critical infrastructure that supports society through FEW services, national security, and defense systems.
The team is using data-based methods to examine how the environments that typically generate severe thunderstorms may change in climate model simulations. They will then test the effect of these changes on severe thunderstorms and tornadoes in simulations using a storm model. The results of both steps can be combined together to examine how severe thunderstorms may change in the future, which will help society better plan and adapt.
PI:Jake Hosen (ABE); Co-PIs: Sara McMillan (ABE/EEE), Laura Bowling (AGRO); Funding: USDA-NIFA
The team is developing a mechanistic understanding of the water quality function of agricultural wetlands and environmental regulation of other ecosystem services (ie, water for irrigation) and disservices (ie, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that drive climate change).
The team is working to advance the theory and practice of resilience engineering through establishing a pluralistic, data-centric and uncertainty-informed framework to efficiently characterize multi-dimensional infrastructure resilience under stochastic hazards as well as plausible infrastructure evolution (due to adaptation or mitigation strategies) and climate change scenarios.
Growing heat-tolerant maize can reduce yield losses due to climate change by up to 36% (rainfed) and 93% (irrigated). Heat Tolerant Maize for Asia (HTMA, 2013-17) helped smallholder farmers in climate-vulnerable ecologies to secure their food security and livelihoods, ensured technologies' equal access to women farmers and incorporated gender-preferred nutrition traits. 50+ CIMMYT maize hybrids have been licensed to public and private partners (2015-2020) for release. By 2020, farmers had adopted 16 varieties on over 20,000 ha.
Seed Grants
The following seed grants were given to multiple Purdue faculty in fall 2021 to help initiate new climate-related projects in areas ranging from diseases in wild animals and domestic livestock to smoke taint in wine. Read below for more on their exciting new projects.
This project's long-term aim is to determine the precise drivers of Hemorrhagic septicemia (HS) outbreaks and to predict the potential impacts of future climate scenarios.
This project will lay the foundation for the selection of appropriate visualization methods when communicating climate change to different stakeholders that can be utilized by all associated disciplines who work together to win local buy-in.
Current biofuels approaches are typically limited to production of ethanol using yeast or recombinant bacteria. This project looks to nature for a potential solution by testing the hypothesis that the microbial mat of Hot Lake, a heliothermal lake in northern Washington, is diagenetically converted into hydrocarbons when interred in sediment.
This project proposes a new hypothesis to explain global cooling that occurred between roughly 1500-1850, a period referred to as the Little Ice Age (LIA).
PI: Di Qi(MATH); Co-PIs: James Garrison(Aero/Astro, ECE); Wen-Wen Tung(EAPS); Lei Wang(EAPS)
This proposal aims to resolve, from the fundamental level, significant obstacles to understanding and predictions of the pathways to Arctic Amplification through tropical-extratropical interactions.
For the proposed project the team will create technology for the wine industry to adapt to climate-change related wildfires: engineered yeast to biologically remediate undesirable smoke-taint compounds in wine.
The Colorado River supplies water to >40 million people and is used to irrigate 5.5 million acres of land in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. In this project the team will use cosmogenic helium paleothermometry (CHP) to document the onset of snowpack loss at two pilot field sites in the Rocky Mountains of north-central Colorado.
This project will use preliminary results from the survey to develop and launch a more thorough assessment of scientific and practitioner knowledge of the interactions between climate change and agriculture.
