RII Track-1: Climate Resilience through Multidisciplinary Big Data Learning, Prediction & Building Response Systems (CLIMBS)

The Commonwealth of Kentucky faces mounting threats from global environmental change and natural hazards, including extreme weather events, floods, droughts, and landslides. This "Climate Resilience through Multidisciplinary Big Data Learning, Prediction & Building Response Systems" (CLIMBS) project aims to advance the fields of climate science, geohazards engineering, and disaster management to facilitate improved sustainability, resilience, and adaptative engineering to climate change. CLIMBS research will target underserved communities in eastern Kentucky, an Appalachian region that is especially vulnerable to climate change. The research will produce a holistic understanding of climate change processes in Kentucky across multiple spatial and temporal scales, determine the influence of climate change on geohazards that threaten the commonwealth, and establish an enhanced "tools and technology framework" for climate change mitigation and community disaster response. Results of this research will benefit Kentucky's key industries of manufacturing, data analytics, energy transition, and engineering, and help train a science and engineering workforce that will allow smaller industries to flourish. CLIMBS will be administered by the University of Kentucky in collaboration with seven other institutions: University of Louisville, Eastern Kentucky University, Northern Kentucky University, Western Kentucky University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, and Thomas More College. CLIMBS seeks to address major knowledge gaps that surround: (i) climate change processes affecting Kentucky; (ii) patterns in climate change impacts; (iii) controls on severe weather and extreme events; (iv) climate triggers, thresholds, and feedbacks that result in flood and landslide hazards; and (v) climate-smart sustainable design and resilience engineering in the built environment. To address these issues, CLIMBS will acquire the contemporary atmospheric and paleoenvironmental data needed to assess the causes, patterns, and characteristics of regional climate dynamics (to include extreme weather) across space and time, as well as facilitate predictions for the impacts of climate change on Kentucky's critical zone and water resources. Researchers will pursue integrative, long-term environmental monitoring experiments to develop the "big data" and cyberinfrastructure needed to quantify the processes, feedbacks, and threshold conditions that trigger floods and landslides, and establish instrumented watersheds and hillslope monitoring sites. Initial monitoring sites will be deployed in socio-economically vulnerable areas of eastern Kentucky, to bridge with project elements designed to improve education and outreach in Appalachia. Additionally, CLIMBS will analyze Kentucky's built environment and socio-behavioral systems, and use big data, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and computational tools to evaluate vulnerabilities to climate change and improve real-time disaster detection, warning systems, and the response toolkit. Ten new faculty hires are planned in the first three years of the project. The core research program is well integrated with education, workforce development, and diversity plans that span academic, federal, commonwealth, and private sectors. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.