UB summer research program to examine WNY climate and extreme weather events, including 2022 blizzard

BUFFALO, N.Y. — What role did a lack of ice on Lake Erie play in Buffalo’s 2022 blizzard? What are the chances that wildfire smoke from Canada will make its way to Western New York again?

Graduate students will investigate these climate hazard and extreme weather event questions this summer at the University at Buffalo’s Center for Geological and Climate Hazards. The program will last for 10 weeks starting in May and is funded by a $433,709 grant from the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (NSF REU) program. Additional 10-week programs in 2026 and 2027 are also funded by the grant. 

The grant’s principal investigator is Sophie Nowicki, PhD, Empire Innovation Professor in the UB Department of Earth Sciences and director of the Center for Geological and Climate Hazards.

“The research that students will pursue in this program are of interest to UB researchers studying climate change but are also topical and relevant for anyone living in Western New York,” says Nowicki, who is also a core faculty member at the UB RENEW Institute. “Western New York is relatively resilient to climate change compared to other regions that are coastal or more susceptible to drought, but that doesn't mean that we are immune from the impacts of climate change. No where on Earth is immune.”

Nowicki and the grant’s other investigators are in the process of selecting 10 undergraduate students from across the country for this summer’s program. Each student will be assigned a research topic with two advisors from either the College of Arts and Sciences or the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“All the research topics in the program address the complex challenges posed by global climate change, but the majority specifically address challenges faced by Western New York and the Great Lakes region,” says the grant’s co-principal investigator, Joseph Tulenko, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences.        

Those topics include the ’22 blizzard, which claimed the lives of at least 32 people in Western New York.

The surface water of Lake Erie was not frozen at the time of the blizzard due to higher-than-average temperatures throughout the month of December, which increased the possibility of lake-effect snow, according to a report by the New York State Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.

Led by Stuart Evans, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Geography, one of the projects will relate maps of lake ice coverage and water temperature to observed snowfall around Western New York. 

Another project, led by Susan Clark, PhD, Edward J. Kikta Jr. Innovation Professor of Experiential Learning in the Department of Environment and Sustainability, will collect data to quantify and map the impact that the blizzard had on the city’s most vulnerable communities.

Buffalo experienced the most polluted days in its recorded history, when weighted by the U.S. population, during the 2023 Canadian wildfires, so another project will try to understand the surface conditions that led to the fires and the meteorological conditions that led to the cross-border transport of smoke. Led by Kang Sun, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, students will analyze meteorological and smoke distribution data from the Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Other projects will investigate:

• How climate change will affect the Great Lakes region, which has abundant fresh water and a mild climate but is expected to experience increasingly wet winters and dry summers this century
• Whether the rocks around the Lake Erie shoreline make the region more or less vulnerable to landslides and other mass wasting events
• What automobile simulator experiments and machine learning can tell us about how driving behavior changes during snowy weather conditions

Nowicki, who is an expert on ice sheet modeling and sea level rise, says it can sometimes be difficult for researchers to make climate change issues relatable and understandable to the public. 

“We expect sea levels to rise 20 centimeters by 2050, but what exactly does that mean and what does that look like? Having the topics in the program linked to Buffalo and Western New York as much as possible helps bring the topic of climate change home in a way that we can all understand,” she says.

A key element of the program is teaching students how to conduct interdisciplinary research. Many of the projects will involve faculty from multiple departments and with different expertise. 

Nowicki says that climate hazard and extreme weather event research requires researchers across many disciplines to collaborate. For example, her research requires her to understand what is happening to the ice sheets, but also on what is occurring in the atmosphere and the ocean. And while she’s mostly focused on ice sheet thickness in the present and future, she must collaborate with researchers who study the ice sheets’ ancient past in order to do so. 

“The Earth is one interconnected system, so by nature, climate research is very interconnected across many disciplines,” she says. “If you’re going to conduct research that’s impactful to the planet, you need to be aware of the bigger picture.”