Browsing by Subject "climate"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 22

Asthma Risk and the Co-occurrence of Thunderstorms and Elevated Pollen: Measuring the Strength of Association, Investigating the Effects in Subgroups, and Leveraging Data Across Large Areas.
(2022-05) Smith, Morrison
Abstract Severe asthma has been shown to occur in the combined presence of high pollen and thunderstorms, termed thunderstorm asthma. Previous research has focused on rare ‘epidemic’ events, such as in Melbourne, Australia 2016 where emergency room usage was 900% higher during a single thunderstorm asthma event. In my dissertation, we investigate thunderstorm asthma conditions in the Twin-Cities metro region, Minnesota, U.S.A., using detailed exposure estimates from a network of weather sensors along with daily pollen records, and asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits from 2007-2018. In manuscript 1, we investigate the association between asthma-related ED visits and thunderstorm asthma conditions within a study radius of 20 miles from the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) airport using a time series model approach. We evaluated risk for the entire study area combined and at the individual zip code level to investigate potential effect heterogeneity and spatial auto-correlation. We find a 1.05 (95% CI: 1.012,1.083) times higher risk on the day of a thunderstorm asthma event with no evidence of spatial autocorrelation or effect heterogeneity. In manuscript 2, we investigate relative and absolute risk disparities of thunderstorm asthma by age and sex subpopulations. We find evidence that thunderstorm asthma has impacts across the life course for men and women, with variation in risk by individual age-sex groups contrary to typical baseline patterns of severe asthma incidence. For males 18-44 the RR of severe asthma was 1.123 times higher on storm days (95% CI: 1.042, 1.211) compared to non-storm days,] with 1.098 times higher risk of incident severe asthma on storm days for females over 45 (95% CI: 1.020, 1.181) compared to non-storm days. In manuscript 3, we investigate the ability to leverage exposure information from a single pollen site in MSP and land-use covariates to estimate thunderstorm asthma associations at 19 communities across the state of Minnesota. Using meta-regression, we find a positive association between deciduous tree and grassland land cover with the thunderstorm asthma effect size, and we find an attenuation of the thunderstorm asthma risk as distance increases from the MSP pollen site.
Bootstrap Techniques in the Partial Linear Model
(2016-04) Heyman, Megan
As a tree grows, the trunk diameter increases, and in a typical year, a tree-ring is produced. The width of this ring reflects growing conditions during the year -- when standardized, a wider ring indicates better growing conditions. Thus, tree-rings contain yearly climatic information, such as precipitation and temperature. Tree-ring records exist for thousands of years in many locations across the earth, and a goal of paleoclimatologists is to use these records to understand past climate. A subset of records from the international tree-ring data bank (ITRDB) for Pinus ponderosa is introduced and analyzed in this talk. We specifically address what significant signals (long or short term) are included in this chronology. A newly proposed resampling technique, called the wild scale-enhanced bootstrap (WiSE bootstrap), is utilized in this analysis and implemented using the WiSEBoot R package. This methodology is based in a partial linear model where the nonparametric component is approximated by a wavelet basis. The WiSE bootstrap provides a model selection (in the basis dimension) and consistent parameter estimates. Additionally, the document includes an overview of all of our research results involving the partial linear model, bootstrap, and wavelets.
Bulletin No. 12. Surface Formations and Agricultural Conditions of Northwestern Minnesota
(Minnesota Geological Survey, 1915) Leverett, Frank; Purssell, U.G.
This bulletin is a preliminary paper which treats the soils of only the northwest quarter of Minnesota. It will be followed by a report on the entire State, the field work for which will soon be completed. The work has been done in accordance with the agreement for cooperation between the United States Geological Survey and the Minnesota Geological Survey, entered into March, 1912. By this agreement the services of Professor Frank Leverett were secured for surveying the surface formations and soils. Mr. Leverett has been engaged for some twenty years in studying the surface geology of the Great Lakes region and because of his large experience in the greater area he is particularly well prepared to undertake the studies in Minnesota. He has spent, moreover, considerable time in the State studying its physiography in connection with the preparation of a monograph for the United States Geological Survey. Since the reorganization of the State Survey, the salary of Mr. Leverett has been met by the United States Geological Survey, while the greater part of his expenses have been paid by the State Survey. The State Survey has provided also for this work the services and expenses of Professor F. W. Sardeson, who has assisted in this work for the past three seasons. For brief periods, also, the State has supplied the services of Arthur H. Elftman, P. R. McMiller, and G. R. Mc- Dole. We wish to acknowledge the generous assistance of the Division of Soils of the Department of Agriculture of the University of Minnesota and of the United States Bureau of Soils, both of which have contributed unpublished data. The valuable contributions to the knowledge of the surface formations of Minnesota by the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey, under the direction of Professor N. H. Winchell, particularly those of Mr. Warren Upham of that Survey, have aided greatly in the preparation of this report. The section on climatic conditions in Minnesota has been generously contributed without any cost to the Survey by Mr. U. G. Purssell, Director of the Minnesota Section of the United States Weather Bureau. In the preparation of the maps and other data showing dates of killing frosts, lengths of growing season, rainfall, etc., Professor C. J. Posey has rendered efficient service.
Bulletin No. 13. Surface Formations and Agricultural Conditions of Northeastern Minnesota
(Minnesota Geological Survey, 1917) Leverett, Frank; Sardeson, Frederick W.; Purssell, U.G.
This bulletin is a preliminary paper which treats the soils of only the northeast quarter of Minnesota. It will be followed by a report on the entire state, the field work for which already has been completed. The work has been done in accordance with the agreement for cooperation between the United States Geological Survey and the Minnesota Geological Survey, entered into, March, 1912. By this agreement the services of Mr. Frank Leverett were secured for surveying the surface formations and soils. Mr. Leverett has been engaged since 1886, or thirty years, in studying the surface geology of the Great Lakes region and because of his large experience in the greater area he was particularly well prepared to undertake the studies in Minnesota. He has spent, moreover, considerable time in the state studying its physiography in connection with the preparation of a monograph for the United States Geological Survey. Since the reorganization of the State Survey, the salary of Mr. Leverett has been met by the United States Geological Survey, while the greater part of his expenses have been paid by the State Survey. The State Survey has provided also for this work the services and expenses of Professor F. W. Sardeson, who has assisted in this work for the past five seasons. For a short period, also, the State has supplied the services of Dr. Arthur H. Elftman. We wish to acknowledge the generous assistance of the Division of Soils of the Department of Agriculture of the University of Minnesota and of the United States Bureau of Soils. The valuable contributions to the knowledge of the surface formations of Minnesota by the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey, under the direction of Professor N. H. Winchell, particularly those of Mr. Warren Upham of that Survey, have aided greatly in the preparation of this report. The section on climatic conditions in Minnesota has been generously contributed without any cost to the Survey by Mr. U. G. Purssell, Director of the Minnesota Section of the United States Weather Bureau. In the preparation of the maps and other data showing dates of killing frosts, lengths of growing season, rainfall, etc., Professor C. J. Posey has rendered efficient service.
Bulletin No. 14. Surface Formations and Agricultural Conditions of The South Half of Minnesota
(Minnesota Geological Survey, 1919) Leverett, Frank; Sardeson, Frederick W.; Purssell, U.G.
This bulletin treats the soils of only the south half of Minnesota. The field embraced includes the part of the state south from the median line, which is near latitude 46° 25'. Following the plan in Bulletin No. 12, on Northwestern Minnesota, a brief general description of the surface features and deposits of the entire state is given, and the climate of the entire state also is discussed. It will be followed by a report on the entire state, the field work for which already has been completed. The work has been done in accordance with the agreement for cooperation between the United States Geological Survey and the Minnesota Geological Survey, entered into, March, 19I2. By this agreement the services of Mr. Frank Leverett were secured for surveying the surface formations and soils. Mr. Leverett has been engaged since 1886, or thirty-two years, in studying the surface geology of the Great Lakes region and because of his large experience in the greater area he was particularly well prepared to undertake the studies in Minnesota. He has spent, moreover, considerable time in the state studying its physiography in connection with the preparation of a monograph for the United States Geological Survey. Since the reorganization of the State Survey, the salary of Mr. Leverett has been met by the United States· Geological Survey, while the greater part of his expenses have been paid by the State Survey. The State Survey has provided also for this work· the services and expenses of Professor F. W. Sardeson, who has assisted· in this work for five seasons. We wish to acknowledge the generous assistance of the Division of Soils of the Department of Agriculture of the University of Minnesota and of the United States Bureau of Soils. The valuable contributions to the knowledge of the surface formations of Minnesota by the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey under the direction of Professor N. H. Winchell, particularly those of Mr. Warren Upham of that survey, have aided greatly in the preparation of this report. The section on climatic conditions in Minnesota has been generously contributed without any cost to the Survey by Mr. U. G. Purssell, Director of the Minnesota Section of the United States Weather Bureau. In the preparation of the maps and other data showing dates of killing frosts, lengths of growing season, rainfall, etc., Professor C. J. Posey has rendered efficient service.
Camp Ripley Sentinel Landscape Climate Resilience Analysis and Strategic Plan Amendments
(University of Minnesota Duluth, 2023-07) Bartsch, Will; Cai, Meijun; Johnson, Kris; Nixon, Kristi; Sprague, Tiffany; Wright, Chris; Olsen, Louis; Reed, Jane
Camp Ripley is a military training facility located in central Minnesota. It is surrounded by the 750,000-acre Camp Ripley Sentinel Landscape (CRSL). Created in 2015, the CRSL consists of working and natural lands surrounding Camp Ripley with the purpose of protecting the training mission of the facility. The rural character of this landscape is generally compatible with that mission. However, it could be compromised by development, which could diminish habitat quality and raise the potential for conflict with landowners. The ability of Camp Ripley to maintain its mission is also threatened by a changing climate, which is projected to get warmer and wetter with a higher frequency of large precipitation events in the region. To help ensure the viability of the mission, the Natural Resources Research Institute assessed climate vulnerabilities and developed strategies to build and enhance climate resilience. Specifically, we 1) evaluated and selected Global Climate Models (GCM) that are expected to perform well in the region, 2) modeled stream water quantity and quality under different land use and climate scenarios, 3) characterized the landscape using Geographic Information Systems, 4) modeled and identified high-quality habitat for at-risk species, 5) evaluated and ranked parcels for conservation and restoration opportunities, 6) created afforestation plans for individual parcels, and 7) amended the Camp Ripley Strategic Plan with climate resilience language and strategies. Modeling stream quantity and quality under different land use scenarios indicates generally increased flow and sediment and nutrient concentration in scenarios where forest land is converted to agriculture or developed. Modeling under different future climate scenarios generally predicts decreased summer baseflow and increased nutrient and sediment concentrations. A suite of environmental data was acquired and developed to help characterize the landscape and prioritize parcels for conservation or restoration activity. Habitat models were developed for the Red-shouldered hawk, Golden-winged warbler, Northern long-eared bat, and Blanding’s turtle, all listed as at-risk or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Afforestation plans with carbon sequestration modeling and carbon market participation compensation estimates were completed for two parcels within the landscape, illustrating an economically viable, market-driven solution. Climate resilience language was added to the strategic plan with emphasis placed on the restructuring and expansion of the strategy table while improving alignment with Minnesota’s Climate Adaptation Framework.
Introducing Novel Relationships in Time Series Data
(2018-12) Agrawal, Saurabh
In many scientific and engineering domains such as climate, neuroscience, transportation, etc. measurements are collected from sensors installed in different parts of a complex dynamical system over regular intervals of time, resulting in a collection of large volumes of time series data. Automated data-driven approaches that can mine relationships between different time series could potentially lead to discovery of previously unknown physical processes which could further aid in designing policies and solutions to critical problems such as climate change, severe mental disorders, traffic congestion etc. This thesis defines novel relationships and patterns that can be studied in the time series data. In particular, the proposed definitions can capture two new types of relationships: i) multivariate relationships involving more than two time series, and ii) sub-interval relationships, that only exist during certain sub-intervals of time and are absent or occur very feebly during rest of the time. The other major contributions of this thesis include designing new automated data-driven approaches to find most interesting instances of defined relationships from the data in a computationally efficient manner, and proposing empirical approaches to assess the statistical significance of obtained relationships. The proposed approaches were applied to real-world datasets from two scientific domains: i) climate, and ii) neuroscience, and led to discovery of several new instances of relationships. Many of these instances are found to be statistically significant and reproducible in multiple time series datasets that are independent of the original dataset. One such instance led to the discovery of a climate phenomenon that was previously unknown to climate scientists.
Lake Sensitivity To Late-Holocene Climate Change In The Western Great Lakes Region Based On Diatom-Depth Reconstruction
(2018-07) Woods, Phillip
Lake sediments provide an unparalleled source of proxy records of Holocene climate change and landscape response. Existing studies show overall synchrony in the upper Midwest (USA) to major climate periods (e.g., Holocene Thermal Maximum, and cooler/wetter late-Holocene), but less synchrony in response to shorter climate anomalies such as the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Little Ice Age (LIA). We examined a sediment core from Cheney Lake (northwest Wisconsin, USA), a lake positioned high in the landscape to reconstruct regional hydrologic climate response using diatom records to predict lake depth for the last 3500 years. To reconstruct historical changes in lake depth, a single lake diatom-based model was constructed based on species-depth relationships from 18 modern surface samples collected at depths of 0.5 to 5 m from Cheney Lake. Based on redundancy analysis (RDA), lake depth explained ~27% of the variance in diatom community abundance. A transfer function for reconstructing lake depth was developed using weighted averaging (WA) regression with inverse deshrinking. The transfer function was applied to downcore diatom communities in a 93-cm long 14C-dated core collected from a littoral zone site, to estimate lake level changes over the last 3500 years. Results suggest that Cheney Lake was almost 6 m deeper beginning ~3500 cal. yr BP, nearly twice as deep as the modern lake, a condition that persisted for several thousand years. An abrupt decrease in water depth occurred around 1500 cal. yr BP, reaching minimal depths around 700 cal. yr BP during the Medieval Climate Anomaly. Lake levels then rebounded and remained ~4 m above modern lake level until ~0 cal. yr BP (1950 CE). An abrupt decrease in moisture availability is evident in the last ~60 years, when lake levels fell to current low levels.
Minnesota WeatherTalk, 2016 (January-December)
(University of Minnesota Extension, 2016) Seeley, Mark
Minnesota WeatherTalk, 2017 (January-December)
(University of Minnesota Extension, 2017) Seeley, Mark
Minnesota WeatherTalk, 2018 (January-December)
(University of Minnesota Extension, 2018) Seeley, Mark
Minnesota WeatherTalk, 2019 (January-December)
(University of Minnesota Extension, 2019) Seeley, Mark
Minnesota WeatherTalk, 2020 (January-December)
(University of Minnesota Extension, 2020) Seeley, Mark
Organizational and work correlates of sleep
(2020-06) Yamada, Tetsuhiro
Sleep has been associated with various work and health outcomes. Despite this, only a narrow range of its correlates have been studied in the IO/OB literature. Meanwhile, approximately one-third of adults in the United States have been found to be sleep-deprived, underscoring the importance of investigating potential correlates from multiple perspectives, one of which is the work context. To begin to address this issue, the current series of studies investigated a greater range of characteristics of the work context associated with sleep than has previously been studied, as well as develop a construct that pertains to the attitudes toward, and practices regarding, sleep. In Study 1, the construct of sleep climate was introduced to represent characteristics of the workplace regarding communication about sleep as well as practices, expectations, and attitudes that directly target sleep (e.g., education about proper sleep). In a sample of online participants, sleep climate along with other selected work context variables (e.g., climate, job characteristics) were found to correlate with sleep behavior. In Study 2, the malleability of sleep climate was investigated. Among a sample of medical school students, it was found that a workshop designed to teach the negative consequences of poor sleep as well as sleep tips positively altered sleep climate perceptions of participants. Furthermore, this change was accompanied by positive changes in sleep quality and quantity. In Study 3, agreement of sleep climate perceptions within workplaces was investigated. Among medical residents, membership in residency programs and learning sites was a significant source of variance in sleep climate perception. Agreement indices also suggested that the level of agreement on sleep climate perception of individuals at a given workplace is comparable to level of agreement on other work context variables such as general climate and job characteristics. In addition, relationships between these work context variables and sleep that were found in Study 1 were largely replicated. Implications of these findings are discussed, along with practical recommendations.
Proceedings of the 1st Agricultural Drainage and Water Quality Field Day
(2002-08-14) Strock, Jeffrey S.; Baker, Jim; Busman, Lowell; Gupta, Satish; Moncrief, John; Randall, Gyles; Russelle, Michael; Taylor, Elwynn
Proceedings of the 4th Drainage Water Management Field Day
(2011-08-23) Strock, Jeffrey S.; Gupta, Satish; Sands, Gary; Ranaivoson, Andry; Hay, Chris; Talbot, Mike; Magner, Joe
The Shelterbelt “Scheme”: Radical Ecological Forestry and the Production of Climate in the Fight for the Prairie States Forestry Project
(2019-01) Snow, Meagan
In 1934 the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration announced the creation of the “largest project ever undertaken in the country to modify climate and agricultural conditions.” The Shelterbelt Project, later known as the Prairie States Forestry Project, was designed to alter local climatic conditions around the 100th meridian through the planting of large bands designed to slow the winds and conserve moisture in the soil. The Shelterbelt Project was made possible by the work of radical foresters who were fighting within their field to establish forestry as its own ecological science with a vital role to play in public service. Raphael Zon and his colleagues translated Roosevelt’s broad vision into a technical scientific plan and set themselves apart by embracing forestry as relational and inherently political, acknowledging both that economic drivers contribute to climatic shifts, and that environmental and climatic problems have the potential to be mitigated through political solutions. This project uses archival material and the academic writings of project stakeholders to demonstrate how the spatial ontologies of the Shelterbelt Project’s advocates and critics produced different conceptions of climate. It also traces how their thinking affected the types of science they saw as legitimate and the policy solutions they fought for. Though some academic geographers involved with the debate around the Shelterbelt Project wrote explicitly about space, for others, understanding their view of space comes from examining how they viewed the relationship between society, politics, and the environment. Geographers Carl Sauer, Isaiah Bowman, and Ellsworth Huntington fundamentally disagreed with Zon and other ecological foresters about the best way to combat climatic instability because their own spatial ontologies always predicated human geography (including political and social solutions) on top of what they saw as an unchanging set of naturally occurring environmental conditions. Focusing on land-use policy and population resettlement as the solution to climatic instability, these geographers ignored the ways in which economic systems were exacerbating environmental differences, casting changes as naturally-occurring in order to remove environmental solutions from the realm of political debate and to insert their own political expertise after the fact as a solution. These actions amounted to a geographical production of climate through the logic of regional and deterministic geography.
St. Paul Campus Phenology Corrected Data, 1941-1991.
(2012-11-09) Hodson, Alexander C.
First leafing and flowering, a total of 14 phenological events, for woody plants on or near the St. Paul Campus of the University recorded by Prof. A. C. Hodson (1906-1996) during a 51-year period (1941-1991).
St. Paul Campus Phenology Data Notebooks, 1941-1960
(2011-10-17) Hodson, Alexander C.
Three notebooks of handwritten data regarding fourteen plant phenological events from 1941 to 1960 in and around the St. Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota collected by Professor Alexander C. Hodson (1906-1996), who was Head of the Department of Entomology, Fisheries and Wildlife at the University from 1960-1974.
A Study of Dimensionality Reduction Techniques and its Analysis on Climate Data
(2015-10) Kumar, Arjun
Dimensionality reduction is a significant problem across a wide variety of domains such as pattern recognition, data compression, image segmentation and clustering. Different methods exploit different features in the data to reduce dimensionality. Principle component Analysis is one such method that exploits the variance in data to embed data onto a lower dimensional space called the principle component space. These are linear techniques which can be expressed in the form B=TX where T is the transformation matrix that acts on the data matrix X to the reduced dimensionality representation B. Other linear techniques explored are Factor Analysis and Dictionary Learning. In many problems, the observations are high-dimensional but we may have reason to believe that the they lie near a lower-dimensional manifold. In other words, we may believe that high-dimensional data are multiple, indirect measurements of an underlying source, which typically cannot be directly measured. Learning a suitable low-dimensional manifold from high-dimensional data is essentially the same as learning this underlying source. Techniques such as ISOMAP, Locally Linear Embedding, Laplacian EigenMaps (LEMs) and many others try to embed the high-dimensional observations in the non-linear space onto a low dimensional manifold. We will explore these methods making comparative studies and their applications in the domain of climate science.

University Digital Conservancy

Browse by Subject

Browsing by Subject "climate"