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How can computer science help in climate change research?

Photo: Courtesy NASA /
Goddard Space Flight Center

The University of Minnesota and the Planetary Skin Institute have created a partnership to use data mining tools to track historical changes in the Earth’s forest ecosystems and better determine their relationship to climate change. By applying the data mining methods developed at the University of Minnesota on a global scale, CS&E Professor and Department Head Vipin Kumar and his team of researchers are creating comprehensive histories of large-scale changes in the ecosystem due to fires, logging, droughts, flood, farming, and other events. Kumar’s team is also developing a planetary information system under the Planetary Skin Institute initiative that can help researchers study these ecosystem disturbances and their relationship to global climate variability and human activity.

For more on this story see University of Minnesota computer scientists to help track global climate change through new data mining tools and the Planetary Skin website.