Congressman Lou Correa signs $2.2 million check for Chapman research lab

The check will go towards researching natural hazards, food insecurity, droughts and climate change modeling, as well as putting together a demonstration on the congressman’s district. Photo by RENEE ELEFANTE, managing editor

Much to the excitement of graduate student Rejoice Thomas and the other members of the Earth Systems Science and Data Solutions Lab at Chapman University, the university received a $2.2 million check from Congressman Lou Correa (D-46) that will fund the lab’s ongoing research regarding droughts and climate change.

“It’s very exciting in a lot of ways,” said Thomas, who is working towards his Ph.D. in computational and data sciences. “It is humbling to see that somebody has found (our research) this deserving enough to allocate this much, as it’s a big amount of money. And we do feel that now the responsibility is on us to deliver that expectation.”

The check was announced to members of the Chapman community on April 14 inside Memorial Hall, where President Daniele Struppa and Correa both spoke on the importance of the grant. The announcement was followed by a brief tour of the Keck Center for Science and Technology, as well as a short discussion with some of the team members working on the research.

Chapman was one of several places in O.C. to receive funding from Correa. In total, Correa gave around $30 million for “vital community projects” within the 46th congressional district including $2 million for a theater and performing arts program in the Anaheim Union High School District and $1.5 million for “facilities and equipment” for the Children’s health of Orange County.

“We’re investing today … to train our students, our Ph.D. candidates, as well as a lot of students in the community, to understand our planet,” Correa said. “We went through some very interesting weather patterns, but we have to understand what it means. We have to understand how to predict those weather patterns and to prepare for them. This is why this investment and research is so important.”

According to Thomas, the congressman’s funding will be going towards the lab’s five areas of focus: natural hazards, food insecurity, droughts, climate change modeling and a demonstration on Correa’s congressional district. Specifically, the majority of the funding will be going towards the first four areas of focus.

The lab, which is part of the Schmid College of Science and Technology, is helmed by Hesham El-Askary, a professor who specializes in global climate change and earth systems, among other areas. El-Askary is also the grant’s principal investigator.

For natural hazards, such as droughts and floods, the students will be calculating the average annual loss that these disasters cause, especially as their intensity and frequency has seen an increase in recent years. The students will also be using some data science techniques like causal inference analysis, which looks at the causality of an event.

“We’ve heard of correlation, but causality is what caused it, so we want to take it a step further when it comes to natural hazards,” Thomas said in an interview with The Panther. “It’s a fairly new method in climate analysis, and it’s not widely used in the field of Earth observations, so that is what we want to (look at) for policymakers and for decision makers.”

Natural hazards ties into the second area the lab wishes to research: food insecurity. According to Thomas, natural hazards can cause food insecurity and water scarcity.

“As there is an increase in demand as a population increases, there is a subsequent increase in demand because of an increase in (the) number of people utilizing water for various needs,” Thomas said. “This leads to an expansion of the irrigation and water treatment systems, but the land in general is not able to sustain that.”

Thomas said that the lab seeks to help lawmakers look at the use of water and what would be a more efficient way of using it. Other research topics in these areas include what crops can be grown and which ones should be grown at what time of the year.

Through the third area of focus, droughts, the lab researchers hope to continue working with its drought vulnerability index, which looks at which regions are vulnerable to drought. The lab will also be working with other indicators to study the trend of droughts and trying to see if they can predict what the next cycle will look like, the impact on what’s currently happening and if an increase in water could impact future projections.

The ongoing droughts the state has seen over the past few decades motivated the lab to study this area, since there have been long periods of drought followed by shorter periods of extreme replenishment.

As for climate change modeling — the fourth area the lab wants to study — they plan to buy state-of-the-art equipment regarding software, satellite images, hardware and network capabilities so that once they begin the modeling, they’ll have at least 50 TB of data to work with.

The lab workers plan to approach the modeling by starting broadly with the state of California and then be downscaled to a district. For the other projects, they will be looking first at congressional district data, specifically the 46th district, or even Orange County itself, before moving on to a statewide scale or even on an international scale. 

Internationally, the lab would use data from Africa or Asia and compare it with California since the climates are similar.

“Where we want to create some robust approaches, whatever we are creating should be robust and should be adaptable enough to be used somewhere else also,” Thomas said.

Lastly, the lab is working to create a demonstration of Correa’s congressional district, which includes parts of Anaheim and Orange, in the form of an annual presentation or report. With this, the lab can show Correa what they’re planning to do with the funding they received.

Last year, the lab received a $1 million check from Correa in order to explore new research. Currently, the members are using this funding in order to study the hydrological cycle and hydrological regions in California. Each member is focusing on different areas like precipitation, groundwater and evapotranspiration. 

The goal of this research, according to Thomas, is to try to learn about the interactions between these different components of the hydrological cycle and its impact on the region. Thomas stated that the researchers hope to address questions like “How does changes in the different components of the hydrological cycle impact California?” and “What has been the trend, and what is the projected change of these components?”

Thomas noted that the team is currently working out of a lab in the basement of the Hashinger Science Center, and they “would love” to move to a better environment where they can be more creative and have a motivating environment.

Thomas also said since the lab primarily uses satellite imagery for its data, the team is planning to buy some high-resolution satellite images over the course of three years, something they couldn’t do before since they didn’t have the funding they needed.

“(The funding) takes out a little bit of stress away from having to (worry about) where it is coming from,” Thomas said. “It helps in that way to not think about those things, but to focus on the research that we are doing, because many times, when we don’t get these fundings, we try to work as a graduate student instructor or other things (for our living expenses)... So at least if our living expenses are taken care of, then it really helps take some of the stress away and our focus can be on (the research).”