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2004 Progress Report: Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science
EPA Grant Number: R829402Center: Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science
Center Director: Stein, Michael
Title: Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science
Investigators: Stein, Michael
Institution: University of Chicago
EPA Project Officer: Smith, Bernice
Project Period: March 12, 2002 through March 11, 2007
Project Period Covered by this Report: March 12, 2003 through March 11, 2004
Project Amount: $6,250,049
RFA: Environmental Statistics Center (2001)
Research Category: Ecological Indicators/Assessment/Restoration , Environmental Statistics
Description:
Progress Summary:We have supported six projects to date, one of which has now ended (R829402C004), and the research that has been done within each of them is described in the individual project reports. We describe here activities that cut across the projects.
Students and Postdoctoral Researchers
One of the main objectives of the Center is to educate a new generation of environmental statisticians and statistically sophisticated environmental scientists. Our postdoctoral program is central to this effort. Three of our postdoctoral researchers (postdocs) left this fall for tenure track positions: Dana Draghicescu (Hunter College), Matthew Neidell (Columbia University), and Serge Guillas (Georgia Institute of Technology). One postdoc, Bret Elderd, an ecologist, will be staying on for a third year, which is common for ecologists. Three new postdocs join the Center this fall: Li Chen from North Carolina State University, Mathiew Vrac from University Paris Dauphine and Ecole Polytechnique, and Zepu Zhang from Stanford. Chen is a statistician, Vrac is an applied mathematician, and Zhang is an environmental scientist. All three have extensive experience in both statistics and environmental problems, and we are fortunate to have them.
Four doctoral students are working on the project “Integrating Numerical Models and Monitoring Data.” They are: Ethan Anderes, Hae-Kyung Im, Mikyoung Jun, and Xiaofeng Shao. In addition, Kobi Abayomi, an African-American doctoral student from Columbia University who had his own funding, spent the summer of 2004 working at the Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science (CISES) under Michael Stein on multiple time series models for hourly ozone data.
The project “Air Quality and Reported Asthma Incidence in Illinois” has had three students working on it in the last year. Two Master’s students in Statistics, Xiaoming Bao and Wen Gu, completed their Master’s papers in 2004. Gu is currently a Ph.D. student in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins. Chava Zibman, a Ph.D. student in Statistics, has recently joined the project as a research assistant.
The project “The Detection of a Recovery in Stratospheric and Total Ozone” has several graduate students associated with it. Yue Li and Junjie Xia are both students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. Airong Cai, from the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been working on this project since the summer of 2003 and has recently begun some work on the downscaling project. She is not presently funded through CISES, although we may seek to change that during the coming year. The project “Statistical Applications to Downscaling Climate Projections” has already attracted student interest. In addition to Airong Cai, Anne Hertel from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is working on statistical approaches to downscaling.
All students and postdocs supported by CISES have a primary and secondary mentor, generally from different disciplines. In addition, graduate students have a system of supervision as required by their home departments, which in the case of Statistics at Chicago includes a three-person thesis committee. Students, postdocs, and their mentors write annual statements describing what has been accomplished and what the plans are for the coming year as a way of tracking progress, identifying problems, and providing an opportunity for students and postdocs to discuss their research progress with their mentors.
Seminars
CISES holds seminars on most Thursday afternoons during the academic year, with the majority of speakers coming from outside CISES. Speakers include a broad range of statisticians and other scientists who work on statistical or environmental problems (commonly both) of interest to the Center. The seminars are organized by the postdocs, providing them with an opportunity to familiarize themselves with researchers working in environmental statistics and related areas. These seminars draw a diverse audience and are highly interactive, resulting in an intellectually stimulating experience for both speakers and the audience.
Somewhat more irregularly, CISES holds informal presentations over lunch on Wednesdays. Most of these presentations concern work in progress by CISES members (principal investigators [PIs], postdocs, and graduate students) and provide presenters with an opportunity to receive extensive feedback on ongoing research and attendees with an opportunity to learn about the Center’s wide range of research activities.
Meetings
In March of 2004, we held our annual meeting with our U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Project Officer and four members of our Advisory Committee. All four CISES postdocs and most of the graduate students supported by CISES spoke at the meeting. We received valuable feedback from the committee, although we are still awaiting a written report.
Patricia Bradley from EPA and David Card from the University of California at Berkeley resigned from the committee and did not attend the meeting. We need to find an EPA replacement for Bradley in consultation with our Project Officer. Since there is no longer an econometric component to the Center’s research, we do not plan to replace Card.
In April of 2004, the Chicago Joint Conference on the Environment was held, and CISES served as one of its sponsors. The title of the conference was “Megacities, Climate Change and Biodiversity: Challenges for the Urban Environment,” and the meeting drew a diverse audience of academic and other researchers. Michael Stein and Barry Lesht of CISES were on the organizing committee, and John Frederick, Katharine Hayhoe, and Rao Kotamarthi of CISES were speakers. The meeting highlighted a number of important topics in environmental research and provided an opportunity for the substantial number of CISES attendees to learn about work in these areas. However, the meeting was rather removed from the statistical interests of CISES, so while it was an interesting and worthwhile experiment for CISES to cosponsor the meeting, we would not anticipate cosponsoring any future Chicago Joint Conferences on the Environment, unless the statistical component were considerably stronger.
Together with the EPA-funded statistics center at Colorado State, CISES sponsored a topic contributed paper session at the August 2004 Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto. Three speakers from CISES (two postdocs and one PI) and two speakers from Colorado State University gave talks on a wide variety of problems in environmental statistics.
In October, CISES and the Environmetrics Section of the American Statistical Association cosponsored the Computational Environmetrics Conference. The single session meeting had a very strong lineup of speakers in five sessions: Ecology, Geosciences/Climate, Water Resources, Air Quality, and Health Effects. Two of the speakers were CISES PIs; top environmental statisticians and scientists from all over the country made up the rest of the speakers. All of the talks engendered lively discussion, which usually had to be cut short in order to avoid falling too far behind the full schedule. There was also a successful poster session with 16 posters covering a broad range of statistical methods and applications in fields such as ecology, oceanography, and forestry. Attendees came from all across the country and even from overseas.
Computing
The presence of CISES’s independent computing facility, including Alexis Zubrow, our Programmer/Analyst, most critically, is one of the Center’s most valuable assets. In addition to the enormous amount of typical statistical computing one might expect from a statistics center, we run large-scale numerical models for environmental simulation. In particular, Alexis has completed multi-week runs of the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model for nested domains that include the eastern United States (at 36 km resolution), Illinois (at 12 km resolution), and the greater Chicago area (at 4 km resolution). In addition, he has developed software to simplify the running of CMAQ and has written software to facilitate the extraction, visualization, and analysis of the large amounts of model output. At least one researcher has been able to run CMAQ with little additional help. Rao Kotamarthi and Alexis have tested some of the beta releases of CMAQ and have modified the model for the Center’s specific research goals. This effort was supported by collaborations with both Argonne National Laboratory and EPA’s facility in Research Triangle Park.
The CISES computing environment centers around two Linux clusters. The primary beowulf cluster consists of four dual process Linux boxes with 2 gigabytes of memory each. The four nodes are networked via gigabit ethernet. Recently, a data server has been added to the cluster, expanding the available space to 1.75 terabytes and significantly reducing the load from the computational nodes. The second cluster is used by the research associates for testing and data visualization. The computing environment is set up to facilitate both the co-PIs’ and the research associates’ research goals. In addition to the two clusters, we maintain one Windows machine and two dual boot machines (Windows and Linux).
An essential component in the operation of the computer facilities is the backup plan for the data sets and research results. Currently, the primary cluster has a four part backup system that was described in last year’s annual report. The one addition since last year is that we now have a DVD burner, which can be used to record large data sets, such as output from extended CMAQ runs.
All groups have been informed of the necessity of archiving the information necessary to reproduce computational results in published works. We have created a central archive for storing this information, and encourage researchers, where appropriate, to place copies of this information in the archive. In some instances, such as projects that involve runs of large numerical models, central archiving may not be practical, in which case, researchers are expected to save whatever information would be needed so that research results could be reproduced.
EPA Collaboration
EPA collaborations are described separately for each project, so we just describe some highlights here. The methods described in Jun and Stein (2004) have been enthusiastically adopted by one of our EPA collaborators, Peter Finkelstein, who has spoken about this work at a recent CMAQ meeting hosted by EPA. Xiaofeng Shao, Michael Stein, and Jason Ching are nearing completion of the first paper jointly authored by CISES members and an EPA collaborator.
Our ability to run CMAQ has been greatly enhanced by our collaborations with people at EPA. We have also begun discussions on obtaining accounts on EPA computers to make collaborations and data-sharing easier.
PIs from “Air Quality and Reported Asthma Incidence in Illinois” interact regularly with personnel from the EPA Region 5 Chicago office: Mike Rizzo on air pollution data and Thomas Brody on issues in respiratory health. EPA scientists Drs. Diane Nacci and Jason Grear at the Atlantic Ecology Division of the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL) collaborate on the population growth project in “Model Choice and Ecological Complexity.” Bella Maranion of the Global Programs Division at EPA attended the most recent quarterly meeting of “The Detection of a Recovery in Stratospheric and Total Ozone” group, and we expect her to attend and actively participate regularly in future meetings.
Results to Date
Specific research accomplishments are described in the individual project reports.
Reference:
Jun M, Stein ML. Statistical comparison of observed and CMAQ modeled daily sulfate levels. Atmospheric Environment 2004;38(27):4427-4436.
Future Activities:Although we are only about midway through our budget period, it is critical to plan our future postdoctoral hiring in light of the presently scheduled end of our budget period in March of 2007. We presently have one postdoc beginning his third and last year in CISES (Bret Elderd) and three new postdocs, each of whom have been offered 2-year positions. To remain at four postdocs in Year 4, we would need to hire only one new postdoc this coming year. We do not plan to hire any new postdocs in Year 5, since we do not think 1-year offers would be either attractive or appropriate. Indeed, because the academic calendar lags our budget calendar by 6 months, we will need a 6-month no-cost extension of our budget period just to pay a postdoc beginning in the fall of 2005 for 2 full years. If, as may happen, all of our new postdocs leave after 2 years, we would then be left with only one postdoc during Year 5. Thus, we plan to hire two new postdocs for 2005 so that there will be at least two postdocs in Year 5. Depending on budgetary and intellectual considerations, there is some chance one or more of the present postdocs may stay for a 3rd year, so there may be more than two postdocs present in Year 5. Having five postdocs in Year 4 will strain the mentoring and office capacity of CISES, but we judge this strategy of 1 year with five postdocs followed by a year with at least two postdocs to be the best overall.
The initial proposal for the Center provides budgets for only the first two years of the Center. While it was anticipated that many of the projects would extend into a third year, and perhaps longer, no specific commitments were made to any project beyond the second year. We are now in the midst of the process in deciding on funding for projects in the fourth year. The downscaling project, which began in Year 3, has really just begun and will most likely receive Year 4 funding in line with our expectations from last year. It does not appear that any major new projects will be proposed, although the intellectual directions of all of the remaining four initial projects have changed to a greater or lesser extent. Most likely all four of these projects will receive Year 4 funding, but the amounts will depend on the success to date of the projects, the strength of new work proposed, and the prospects for success in accomplishing the objectives of the proposed work. All projects seeking continuing funding are required to write a description of their planned research that will be evaluated internally and by members of our Scientific Advisory Committee. Groups will be allowed to revise their research plans in light of the feedback they receive before final decisions on funding are made. The present plan is to have Year 4 funding decisions finalized by the end of 2004.
We are always on the lookout for interesting visitors to CISES, although we do not provide any salary money for them. Rosalba Ignaccolo, from the Department of Statistics and Applied Mathematics in Turin, Italy, spent several weeks with us this summer and again this fall, during which time we discussed her work on nonparametric spatial prediction and its application to air pollution. Claudia Tebaldi, a project scientist in the Research Application Program and the Environmental and Societal Impacts group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), plans to visit CISES for a few months in the spring of 2005.
The third meeting for the Center’s Scientific Advisory Committee is scheduled for March 3–4, 2005. This meeting will follow a similar format as the second meeting, which we believe provided a good mix of presentations from PIs, postdocs, and students and allowed time for discussions between Committee members and CISES personnel.
Journal Articles: 37 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
| Other center views: | All 102 publications | 59 publications in selected types | All 37 journal articles |
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Anderes EB, Stein ML. Estimating deformations of isotropic Gaussian random fields on the plane. Annals of Statistics 2008;36(2):719-741. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Chay K, Dobkin C, Greenstone M. The Clean Air Act of 1970 and adult mortality. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 2003;27(3):279-300. |
R829402C004 (2002) R829402C004 (Final) |
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Currie J, Neidell M. Air pollution and infant health: what can we learn from California’s recent experience? The Quarterly Journal of Economics 2005;120(3):1003-1030. |
R829402C004 (Final) |
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Dwyer G, Morris WF. Resource-dependent dispersal and the speed of biological invasions. The American Naturalist 2006;167(2):165-176. |
R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Elderd BD, Doak DF. Comparing the direct and community-mediated effects of disturbance on plant population dynamics: flooding, herbivory, and Mimulus guttatus. Journal of Ecology 2006;94(3):656-669. |
R829402C005 (2004) R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Elderd BD, Dukic VM, Dwyer G. Uncertainty in predictions of disease spread and public health responses to bioterrorism and emerging diseases. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2006;103(42):15693-15697. |
R829402C005 (2004) R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Eshel G, Bernstein J. Relationship between large-scale atmospheric states, subsidence, static stability and ground-level ozone in Illinois, USA. Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 2006;171(1-4):111-133. |
R829402C003 (2002) R829402C003 (Final) |
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Guillas S, Stein ML, Wuebbles DJ, Xia J. Using chemistry transport modeling in statistical analysis of stratospheric ozone trends from observations. Journal of Geophysical Research 2004;109(D22303), doi:10.1029/2004JD005049. |
R829402C001 (2004) R829402C001 (Final) R829402C002 (2004) |
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Guillas S, Tiao GC, Wuebbles DJ, Zubrow A. Statistical diagnostic and correction of a chemistry-transport model for the prediction of total column ozone. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 2006;6(2):525-537. |
R829402C001 (2004) R829402C001 (Final) |
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Im HK, Stein ML, Kotamarthi VR. A new approach to scenario analysis using simplified chemical transport models. Journal of Geophysical Research 2005;110(D24205), doi:10.1029/2005JD006417. |
R829402C002 (2006) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Im HK, Stein ML, Zhu Z. Semiparametric estimation of spectral density with irregular observations. Journal of the American Statistical Association 2007;102(478):726-735. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Jun M, Stein ML. Statistical comparison of observed and CMAQ modeled daily sulfate levels. Atmospheric Environment 2004;38(27):4427-4436. |
R829402C002 (2004) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Jun M, Stein ML. An approach to producing space-time covariance functions on spheres. Technometrics 2007;49(4):468-479. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Kusumo HT, Pfister CA, Wootton JT. Small-scale genetic structure in the sea palm Postelsia palmaeformis Ruprecht (Phaeophyceae). Marine Biology 2006;149(4):731-742. |
R829402C005 (2006) |
not available |
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Loh JM, Stein ML. Spatial bootstrap with increasing observations in a fixed domain. Statistica Sinica 2008;18(2):667-688. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Miller AJ, Cai A, Tiao G, Wuebbles DJ, Flynn LE, Yang S-K, Weatherhead EC, Fioletov V, Petropavlovskikh I, Meng X-L, Guillas S, Nagatani RM, Reinsel GC. Examination of ozonesonde data for trends and trend changes incorporating solar and Arctic oscillation signals. Journal of Geophysical Research 2006;111(D13305), doi:10.1029/2005JD006684. |
R829402C001 (2004) R829402C001 (2006) R829402C001 (Final) |
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Naureckas ET, Dukic V, Bao X, Rathouz P. Short-acting β-agonist prescription fills as a marker for asthma morbidity. Chest 2005;128(2):602-608. |
R829402C003 (2004) R829402C003 (2006) R829402C003 (Final) |
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Neidell MJ. Air pollution, health, and socio-economic status: the effect of outdoor air quality on childhood asthma. Journal of Health Economics 2004;23(6):1209-1236. |
R829402C004 (Final) |
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Pfister CA, Wang M. Beyond size: matrix projection models for populations where size is an incomplete descriptor. Ecology 2005;86(10):2673-2683. |
R829402C005 (2004) R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Reinsel GC, Miller AJ, Weatherhead EC, Flynn LE, Nagatani RM, Tiao GC, Wuebbles DJ. Trend analysis of total ozone data for turnaround and dynamical contributions. Journal of Geophysical Research 2005;110(D16306), doi:10.1029/2004JD004662. |
R829402C001 (2004) R829402C001 (Final) |
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Shao X, Stein ML. Statistical conditional simulation of a multiresolution numerical air quality model. Journal of Geophysical Research 2006;111(D15211), doi:10.1029/2005JD007037. |
R829402 (2006) R829402C002 (2006) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Shao X, Stein M, Ching J. Statistical comparisons of methods for interpolating the output of a numerical air quality model. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 2007;137(7):2277-2293. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. Space-time covariance functions. Journal of the American Statistical Association 2005;100(469):310-321. |
R829402C002 (2002) R829402C002 (2004) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. Statistical methods for regular monitoring data. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) 2005;67(5):667-687. |
R829402C002 (2004) R829402C002 (2006) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. Seasonal variations in the spatial-temporal dependence of total column ozone. Environmetrics 2007;18(1):71-86. |
R829402C002 (2006) R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. Spatial variation of total column ozone on a global scale. Annals of Applied Statistics 2007;1(1):191-210. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Stein ML. A modeling approach for large spatial datasets. Journal of the Korean Statistical Society 2008;37(1):3-10. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Sun L, Wang M. An algorithm for a decomposition of weighted digraphs: with applications to life cycle analysis in ecology. Journal of Mathematical Biology 2007;54(2):199-226. |
R829402C005 (2004) R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Tebaldi C, Hayhoe K, Arblaster JM, Meehl GA. Going to the extremes: an intercomparison of model-simulated historical and future changes in extreme events. Climatic Change 2006;79(3-4):185-211. |
R829402C006 (2006) R829402C006 (Final) |
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Tsao JI, Wootton JT, Bunikis J, Luna MG, Fish D, Barbour AG. An ecological approach to preventing human infection: vaccinating wild mouse reservoirs intervenes in the Lyme disease cycle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2004;101(52):18159-18164. |
R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Vrac M, Stein ML, Hayhoe K, Liang X-Z. A general method for validating statistical downscaling methods under future climate change. Geophysical Research Letters 2007;34(L18701), doi:10.1029/2007GL030295. |
R829402C006 (Final) R830963 (Final) |
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Vrac M, Hayhoe K, Stein M. Identification and intermodel comparison of seasonal circulation patterns over North America. International Journal of Climatology 2007;27(5):603-620. |
R829402C006 (Final) |
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Vrac M, Stein M, Hayhoe K. Statistical downscaling of precipitation through nonhomogeneous stochastic weather typing. Climate Research 2007;34(3):169-184. |
R829402C006 (Final) |
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Wootton JT. Field parameterization and experimental test of the neutral theory of biodiversity. Nature 2005;433(7023):309-312 (letter). |
R829402C005 (2006) R829402C005 (Final) |
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Zhang Z, Beletsky D, Schwab DJ, Stein ML. Assimilation of current measurements into a circulation model of Lake Michigan. Water Resources Research 2007;43(W11407), doi:10.1029/2006WR005818. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Zhang Z, Switzer P. Stochastic space-time regional rainfall modeling adapted to historical rain gauge data. Water Resources Research 2007;43(W03441), doi:10.1029/2005WR004654. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Zubrow A, Chen L, Kotamarthi VR. EAKF-CMAQ: Introduction and evaluation of a data assimilation for CMAQ based on the ensemble adjustment Kalman filter. Journal of Geophysical Research 2008;113(D09302), doi:10.1029/2007JD009267. |
R829402C002 (Final) |
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Economic, Social, & Behavioral Science Research Program, Scientific Discipline, RFA, Environmental Statistics, Health Risk Assessment, Ecological Risk Assessment, risk assessment, ambient airborne particulate matter, environmental indicators, health risk analysis, biostatistics, statistical methods, air pollution, data analysis, environmental risks, infant mortality
Relevant Websites:
http://galton.uchicago.edu/~cises/research/tr.html
Progress and Final Reports:
Original Abstract
2006 Progress Report
Final Report
Subprojects under this Center:
(EPA does not fund or establish subprojects; EPA awards and manages the overall grant for this center).
R829402C001 Detection of a Recovery in Stratospheric and Total Ozone
R829402C002 Integrating Numerical Models and Monitoring Data
R829402C003 Air Quality and Reported Asthma Incidence in Illinois
R829402C004 Quasi-Experimental Evidence on How Airborne Particulates Affect Human Health
R829402C005 Model Choice Stochasticity, and Ecological Complexity
R829402C006 Statistical Approaches to Detection and Downscaling of Climate Variability and Change