[PAST EVENT] Climate change and impacts in the mid-Atlantic coastal region

March 25, 2011
3:30pm
Location
VIMS - Watermen's Hall, McHugh Auditorium
1375 Greate Road
Gloucester Point, VA 23062Map this location
Coastal regions are particularly vulnerable to climate change because they lie at the interface of land, the open ocean, and the atmosphere, all of which are expected to change as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise. To properly manage coastal systems, which face many other anthropogenic stressors, it is essential to have an understanding of how they will respond to climate change. In this presentation, I will review the current understanding of climate change and its impacts on the mid-Atlantic coastal region. The past will be used to gain insight into the sensitivity of the region to climate change and climate models will provide a glimpse into possible futures, which depend on greenhouse gas scenarios. How certain those futures are depends also in part on the plausibility of the models in simulating the past, which will also be reviewed.

Raymond Najjar is an Associate Professor of Oceanography with the Departments of Meteorology and Geosciences at The Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Najjar was a member of the multi-disciplinary research team that recently undertook a Pennsylvania climate impacts assessment under the auspices of the state, and earlier served in a similar capacity with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Assessment (MARA) and the Consortium for Atlantic Regional Assessment (CARA)--projects that provided climate information to stakeholders in the Mid- and Upper-Atlantic Regions of the United States. Dr. Najjar's research ranges from the marine carbon cycle to the impact of climate change on coastal regions and their watersheds. For further details, see {{http://www.met.psu.edu/people/rgn1}}.
Contact

[[ecanuel,Dr. Elizabeth Canuel]]

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