KY EPSCoR: FY25: Climate Resilience through Multidisciplinary Big Data Learning, Prediction & Building Response Systems (CLIMBS) Match for 3200006309

Kentucky is a hotspot of overburdened and underserved communities, due to the complex threats to human life, property, and agriculture posed by climate change, coupled with low baseline income and population health. Yet climate change remains poorly understood and understudied across Kentucky, and this knowledge gap limits our ability to provide climate-smart solutions that help to build resilience in low-income communities. Motivated by this shortcoming and recent disasters that have devastated southern Appalachia, the mission of the Track-1 proposal is to develop a new holistic understanding of the interconnected earth systems and processes operating in Kentucky, and the ability of those processes to sustain both civilization and our natural heritage as the global climate changes. Building climate change preparedness and resiliency through scientific and engineering research, education, and outreach is a central objective of the Track-1. The proposal is designed to develop new data, generate predictions, enhance preparation, and engineer response measures to advance our understanding of climate science, allied geohazards, and sustainability in Kentucky. This will be accomplished through three tasks. Task 1 seeks to produce a holistic understanding of climate change processes in Kentucky across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Task 1 addresses knowledge gaps around the atmospheric processes that generate extreme events, Kentucky’s long-term climate history, and water security under changing climate dynamics. Task 2 seeks to determine the influence of climate change on geohazards that threaten eastern Kentucky, with special emphasis on floods and landslides. Task 2 develops instrumented critical zone sites, to provide real-time, sustained environmental monitoring experiments to determine the processes influencing hazard initiation and magnitude, and thus set a path for detection and early warning. The goal of Task 3 is to establish an enhanced tools and technology framework for climate change mitigation. Task 3 addresses knowledge gaps in emergency management and disaster response best practices through cyberinfrastructure development, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.