A faculty member at Penn State University (PSU) has won a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to create special statistical models of extreme weather. Benjamin Shaby, assistant professor of statistics and Penn State Institute for CyberScience faculty co-hire, will be looking at how to build infrastructure and prepare for events like forest fires and heavy rains.

Benjamin Shaby (Source)

NSF CAREER awards are given to junior faculty members who are both teaching and researching while pursuing outreach opportunities for their results. Shaby has been collaborating with several groups, including the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), NOAA, and the Sustainable Climate Risk Management (SCRiM) program. These groups work together to find the best management strategies for climate risks.

While plenty of spatial models exist to study day-to-day weather events, like daily temperatures, different models are needed to study extreme events, like heat waves. Shaby will be using computationally intensive research methods to create spatial models for extreme events in relation to weather.

Shaby will be looking at data measurements across a large geographic range to better understand how much area extreme events can cover. He explained that his project will seek “to turn individual observations into knowledge about the spatial structure of the entire event.”