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You can use this page to email Patrick Applegate and Klaus Keller about Risk Analysis in the Earth Sciences.
About the Book
Update: Version 1.2 has been released as of 13 June 2016! This version includes a table of contents and continuous page numbers, as well as corrections to various minor issues.
Greenhouse gas emissions have caused considerable changes in climate, including increased surface air temperatures and rising sea levels. Rising sea levels increase the risks of flooding for people living near the world's coastlines. Managing such risks requires an understanding of many fields, including Earth science, statistics, and economics. At the same time, the free, open-source programming environment R is growing in popularity among statisticians and scientists due to its flexibility and graphics capabilities, as well as its large collection of existing software libraries.
This e-textbook presents a series of laboratory exercises in R that teach the Earth science and statistical concepts needed for assessing climate-related risks. These exercises are intended for upper-level undergraduates, beginning graduate students, and professionals in other areas who wish to gain insight into academic climate risk analysis.
The R scripts for this book are available from www.scrimhub.org/raes. The book's source files are stored in a Github repository at https://github.com/scrim-network/raes.
We’d like to make Risk Analysis in the Earth Sciences as useful as possible. If you have a comment about the book or a question about one of the exercises, please post an issue to the Github repository mentioned above.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through the Network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management (SCRiM) under NSF cooperative agreement GEO-1240507. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Other support was provided by the Center for Climate Risk Management and the Rock Ethics Institute.
About the Editors
Patrick Applegate is a Scientific Programmer with the SCRiM (Sustainable Climate Risk Management) network, hosted by the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State. In this role, Patrick helps researchers do the computing-related parts of their work more effectively. In particular, Patrick writes new code in support of ongoing projects (especially in the R programming language), curates and documents existing code and data sets, and helps research students learn to write code.
Patrick earned his Ph. D. in Geosciences at Penn State and is first author or co-author of 20 peer-reviewed scientific papers. His research treats topics including ice sheets and their contributions to sea level rise, methods for estimating the ages of glacial deposits, and the application of statistical methods to problems in the geosciences.
He previously worked as a postdoc in the Bolin Centre for Climate Research at Stockholm University in Sweden and as a postdoc and Research Associate at Penn State’s main campus. He has also taught college-level courses in geology, geography, and statistics at SUNY-Geneseo and Penn State DuBois.
Patrick recently completed Penn State World Campus’ Certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) program, and is working toward the Data Science certificate offered by Johns Hopkins University through Coursera.
Klaus Keller is a Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, with an adjunct appointment as a Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. At Penn State, Keller directs the Center for Climate Risk Management as well as the research network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management (http://scrimhub.org/). Before joining Penn State, he worked as a research scientist and lecturer at Princeton University and as an engineer in Germany. Professor Keller graduated from Princeton with a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering. He received master’s degrees from M.I.T. and Princeton as well as an engineer’s degree from the Technische Universität Berlin. His research addresses two interrelated questions. First, how can we mechanistically understand past and potentially predict future changes in the climate system? Second, how can we use this information to design sustainable, scientifically sound, technologically feasible, economically efficient, and ethically defensible climate risk management strategies? He analyzes these questions by mission-oriented basic research covering a wide range of disciplines such as Earth system science, economics, engineering, philosophy, decision science, and statistics. Klaus’ e-mail address is klaus@psu.edu, and his Web site is at http://www3.geosc.psu.edu/~kzk10/.