Fatemeh Afghah, an associate professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) at Northern Arizona University, has received a $550,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, one of the foundation’s most prestigious awards. The funding will support a project developing algorithms that will enable a fleet of smart and autonomous drones to assess situations, change… Read more
Ben Ruddell
Fallowing cattle-feed farmland simplest way to alleviate western water shortage, FEWSION-based study finds
Depletion of river flow across the US during summer months. The 17 western states experience much higher levels of depletion during July to September than eastern states, owing to lesser precipitation and greater use of irrigation in the western states. a, Summer depletion during the 2001–2015 model simulation. b, Summer depletion in the driest 10% of… Read moreNAU scientists launch FEWSION website, enabling access to complex maps of food, energy, water supply chains
Over the past three years, Ben Ruddell, associate professor of NAU’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS), has led a team of multi-institution engineers and data scientists in developing FEWSION, a data fusion project that maps the food, energy and water supply chains for every community in the United States. The maps are based on an… Read more
What data teaches about flood forecasting: NAU researcher co-leading crowdsourced app to gauge flood water
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), flooding is the most damaging natural hazard in the world, and most flood damage occurs in cities. As exemplified by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, this damage is projected to rapidly increase, both due to increasing extreme precipitation events and urban sprawl into marshes and floodplains—so it is critical that cities… Read more
How does snowmelt in the Rockies affect diners in New York? NAU data mapper part of national study to make those connections
Experts estimate that snowmelt accounts for as much as 75 percent of water supplies in the western United States. As the climate warms, however, it’s not hard to imagine a future when declining snowpack on western mountain ranges means less snowmelt. Scientists and water managers have already seen worrying changes in the timing and amount of runoff from season to season.
These… Read more
There will be an app for that: NAU scientists researching intermittent streams with smartphone technology
As collaborators on one of the first coordinated ecology research projects to study what happens to streams as they dry across the United States, Northern Arizona University researchers Ben Ruddell and Abe Springer will develop an improved smartphone application for mapping wet and dry reaches of streams.
Based on lessons learned from phone apps developed to map the desert springs of… Read more