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Final 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 Amount: $6,250,049
RFA: Environmental Statistics Center (2001)
Research Category: Ecological Indicators/Assessment/Restoration , Environmental Statistics
Description:
Objective:The Center for Integrating Statistical and Environmental Science, or CISES, was established in 2002 as a Cooperative Agreement with the US EPA to support broad-ranging research at the interface of statistical and environmental science. CISES supported six major projects; the accomplishments of each are described in separate reports. This overall summary of CISES focuses on aspects of our work and activities that were not a part of any individual project. To get some idea of the scope of CISES, the total number of PIs involved in our projects was 32, including 9 researchers at government labs who did not receive salary support from EPA funds. In addition to statistics, other disciplines represented among the PIs included ecology, atmospheric physics and chemistry, economics and medicine. Although many of the PIs came from the home of CISES, the University of Chicago, other academic institutions represented among the PIs included University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of California, Berkeley, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Texas Tech University, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. Government scientists came from Argonne National Laboratory (who received salary support from a special fund established by the University of Chicago for this purpose) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (including the National Weather Service, the Aeronomy Laboratory and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service). In addition to our EPA collaborators, we collaborated with numerous researchers from a wide range of institutions including, among others, the Illinois State Water Survey, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Enviornment in Saclay, France, Atmospheric Environment Service in Ottawa, Canada, Bell Laboratories, Columbia University, Stanford University and University of California, Santa Cruz.
Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):As we stated in our original proposal abstract, in addition to advancing the state of the art of environmental statistics, our other primary objective was to “educate a new generation of environmental statisticians and statistically sophisticated environmental scientists.” Our postdoctoral program was a central component of our educational mission. Postdoctoral opportunities for statisticians are very limited and are largely concentrated in applications to the biological sciences. By bringing together a diverse group of young researchers and housing them in a single large office, we provided a total of nine recent Ph.D. recipients with a unique opportunity to expand their intellectual horizons statistically and environmentally (a tenth person at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign received partial postdoctoral support from CISES). These postdocs came with Ph.D.s in statistics, ecology, economics, environmental science and mathematics. The close proximity and common interest in environmental problems created a dynamic and highly interactive setting in which the postdocs were able to learn from each other and gain an appreciation and understanding of disciplines outside their own.
CISES supported a total of 16 graduate students (13 Ph.D. and 5 M.S. students, all but 3 of the Ph.D. students have completed their degrees) from a number of fields, mainly at the University of Chicago, but also at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In addition, a student from University of Illinois at Chicago was a long-time member of two of the projects, although her funding was not from CISES. Because these students were housed in their home departments, they did not necessarily have the daily interaction with peers from different disciplines as did the postdocs. Nevertheless, through joint mentorship of students, the annual CISES meetings, seminar programs and the various informal contacts that naturally emerged from bringing together a critical mass of researchers engaged in environmental statistics, the graduate students received a richer education than they would have in a traditional departmental setting. Facilitating these interactions for students who were not in Chicago was a structural challenge for a center focused at a single institution but with participants at many institutions. One student spent a profitable summer at EPA in Research Triangle Park, but it was difficult to make suitable arrangements for such summer internships and no other students were able to make extended visits to an EPA facility.
One measure of the success of the educational component of CISES is the positions our graduate students and postdocs now have. CISES “alumnae” now have or are about to begin faculty positions at the following institutions: Columbia, Northwestern, University of California, Davis, Texas A&M, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University, Louisiana State University, Hunter College, University College London (UK) and University of Bristol (UK). The remaining doctoral and postdoctoral graduates are in academic postdoctoral positions except for one who works at CNRS (French national center for scientific research) and one who is in private industry. This record of success is a clear indicator of the robust demand for individuals in environmental statistics in general and the ability of CISES to provide a strong educational experience in particular.
Although CISES did not have an official visitors program, a number of individuals made extended visits to CISES using their own funding sources to take advantage of the intellectual atmosphere we provided. These individuals included two postdoctoral visitors, Rosalba Ignaccolo from the University of Torino in Italy and Claudia Tebaldi from NCAR, and two graduate student visitors, one from Columbia University and the other from the University of Rennes in France. Finally, while CISES was not intended to involve undergraduates, one undergraduate was a coauthor on a CISES publication.
A key component of CISES was that it owned its own computing system and had a fulltime staff person, Alexis Zubrow, who was the system administrator but, more importantly, was actively engaged in the research enterprise. By developing a local capability to run sophisticated deterministic numerical models such as CMAQ (EPA’s main air quality model), we gained a greater understanding of their workings and a greater flexibility in the ways we could use these models in our research than we could have if we had to depend on someone else to run them for us. Indeed, if we had developed these capabilities sooner and to a greater degree, some projects that involved the heavy use of air quality and climate models may have been able to accomplish more than they did. We perhaps initially underestimated the difficulty in running such models, but even the process of struggling to understand how the models worked was a valuable learning experience for many CISES participants.
CISES sponsored various forums for the discussion and dissemination of results. We held annual meetings in Chicago including all supported personnel, members of our Scientific Advisory Committee (which included, over the life of CISES, Patricia Bradley and Tony Olsen from EPA, Doug Nychka from NCAR, Sherry Rowland from University of California, Irvine, Scott Zeger from Johns Hopkins, Doug Lettenmaier from University of Washington and Peter Kareiva from the Nature Conservancy) and EPA program officers (Barbara Levinson, Jim Moore, Bernice Smith, Brenda Young and Brandon Jones). Postdocs and graduate students were given prominent roles at these meetings, making presentations and having discussions with the members of the advisory committee and EPA program officers. The feedback received at these meetings was invaluable, although fewer changes in the EPA program officer would have aided us in developing an informed relationship with EPA.
CISES cosponsored two meetings with the Environmetrics Section of the American Statistical Association: the Computational Environmetrics Conference in 2004 and the Multivariate Environmetrics Conference in 2006. Both of these meetings included a short course, a day and a half of talks and a poster session. The meetings were well-attended and lively. The Environmetrics Section of the American Statistical Association is continuing the tradition of biennial meetings and is holding one cosponsored by NCAR in October of 2008. In addition, we held an inaugural meeting in 2002 to publicize our presence to the environmental research community and we cosponsored two meetings, the Chicago Joint Conference on the Environment in 2004 entitled Megacities, Climate Change and Biodiversity: Challenges for the Urban Environment, and the International Conference on Environmental Statistics and Health, July, 2003 in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, our sponsorship consisting of supporting the attendance of two of our postdocs at the meeting. This meeting was part of the process of establishing a Section on Statistics and Environment in the ISI, a leading international statistical association with strong connections to government statisticians.
CISES held an active seminar series throughout its existence. Early during our funding period, the task of organizing the seminars was assigned to the postdocs as a way of encouraging them to interact with the broader environmetrics community. We held both formal and informal (chalkboard) seminars, but even the “formal” seminars were highly interactive and we soon began to warn our speakers that there was a good chance they would not be able to get through all of their slides because of our frequent questions.
As a Cooperative Agreement, all projects were required to seek out and develop active collaborations with EPA scientists. All projects did in fact meaningfully interact with EPA scientists, resulting in a few cases in joint papers with them. Greater collaboration may have occurred if EPA scientists had had further inducements to collaborate, such as having a source of travel funds specifically for visiting CISES or, perhaps even more profitably, opportunities to take brief sabbaticals at CISES.
Conclusions:Contributions to understanding of environmental problems
As the research contributions of each project are detailed in the six project reports, here we only briefly touch on some of the intellectual themes that cut across multiple projects.
One of the intellectual divides that we sought to bridge in much of our work is that between deterministic approaches to modeling environmental processes (often via differential equations) and statistical approaches. We were certainly not alone in this endeavor, as there has been an increasing recognition in many fields that the limited interaction between deterministic and statistical modelers is to neither group’s benefit. To give a few specific examples of our contributions to this integration of approaches, we used deterministic models to remove some of the variability in stratospheric ozone levels in order to obtain sharper inferences on changes in these levels that can be attributed to the Montreal protocols. A second example concerned developing a statistical approach to incorporating measured currents in Lake Michigan into a deterministic model for these currents in a way that respects the natural physical constraints of the system (water is nearly incompressible and the coastline is essentially fixed).
A second major theme of our research was to develop approaches to problems in which variation of processes in both space and time play a key role. This research ranged from theoretical development of new statistical models for spatial-temporal processes, methods for the statistical analysis of spatial-temporal data, computational innovations for carrying out these analyses efficiently and applications of these ideas to numerous environmental processes. These applications covered a wide range of spatial scales, including, to give a few examples, stratospheric ozone at a global scale, precipitation levels at a regional scale and temperature and air pollution variations within an urban area.
One mark of the diversity of our research is the range of journals in which our work appeared. These include, naturally, top statistics journals such as Journal of the American Statistical Association and Annals of Statistics, but also leading scientific journals such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Geophysical Research and Ecology. Environmental problems that our work addressed included, to name a small fraction, the effects of air pollution on asthma in Chicago and on infant mortality in California, the effects of smog alerts on people’s behavior, assessing the accuracy of numerical models for air quality, inferring changes in local precipitation due to human-induced climate change and estimating the abundance of herring roe off the coast of Alaska.
CISES strived to maintain a healthy balance between theory, computation and applications, with research in each nurturing the others. To give one example, our investigation of stratospheric ozone on a global scale led us to the development of new statistical models and methods geared towards spherical spatial domains, an area that had attracted little attention in the statistical literature. Computational issues arose naturally in the analysis of many of the large datasets we examined, leading to a number of innovations in statistical computing. Taking advantage of these theoretical and computational developments, we were able to apply sophisticated statistical methods that took account of spatial and temporal dependencies to a range of large datasets. As more and more environmental data gets collected via remote sensing, the ability to handle massive datasets will become increasingly crucial to environmental statistics.
Although CISES has officially gone out of existence, its effects will endure. The individual project reports describe some research lines that began under CISES and that will continue until their completion, mostly relating to the thesis work of graduate students. But even when this work is finished, the impact of CISES on its participants will continue to be felt. Of course, the research directions of the postdocs and graduate students who were a part of CISES were profoundly affected in a way that will last throughout their scientific careers. The experience they gained from interacting with researchers in other disciplines will undoubtedly expand their research horizons in positive but difficult to anticipate directions. The future research directions of many of the PIs were also permanently influenced by their CISES experiences. For sure, everyone in CISES gained a deep appreciation of the immense challenges and opportunities in environmental statistics, an appreciation they will be able to spread to their colleagues and students for decades to come.
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) |
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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
Progress and Final Reports:
2004 Progress Report
2006 Progress Report
Original Abstract
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