
Richard B. Rood

About
Professor Rood, who is the Dow Sustainability Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the College of Engineering, teaches a class on climate change and the interface of climate change with all aspects of society. This has evolved into a class on climate change problem solving. This is a graduate class, taught in concert with the School for Environment and Sustainability. The class includes business students, policy students, as well as students from several science and engineering departments. Because of this class, more and more, his research interests are on the use of information from climate projections in adaptation to global warming. It's the future. Web link below. In 2014, Paul Edwards, of the School of Information, and Rood introduced a new course called Climate Informatics. The challenge of global climate change presents crucial issues that demand the expertise of both scientists and information professionals. Among these are: Retrieving and presenting complex climate data to non-expert users with specific needs; Building decision-support tools for planning and management; Communicating climate science to broader audiences through simulations, games, or educational software; Establishing reputation and trustworthiness for web-based information sources managing vast Earth system datasets, including curation, provenance, metadata,openness and reproducibility; Designing green IT, such as power-aware computing, smart controllers and smart grids.
Publications
- Evaluating the Appropriateness of Downscaled Climate Information for Projecting Risks of Salmonella (2016).
- A decision tree algorithm for investigation of model biases related to dynamical cores and physical parameterizations (2016).
- Demystifying Climate Models: A Users Guide to Earth System Models (2016).
- Components of the Climate System (2016).
- Usability of Climate Model Projections by Practitioners (2016).
Read more publications here.
His current physical-climate research is focused on bridging the study of weather and climate. With my graduate student Soner Yorgun we are investigating how the dynamical core impacts topographic precipitation. We are investigating specific features, viewing them as objects, and whether they are represented in the same way in different model configurations and observations. I was also co-advisor with Derek Posselt of Erika Roesler, who studied low-level Arctic clouds and their sensitivity to environmental parameters. Erika currently has a postdoc at Sandia National Laboratory.
Ph.D., Florida State University (meteorology)
M.S., Florida State University (meteorology)
B.S., University of North Carolina (physics)