Climate+ is a new vertical offered within Duke University’s Data+ program, a full-time, ten-week summer research experience that welcomes Duke undergraduate and masters students interested in exploring new data-driven approaches to interdisciplinary challenges.
Climate+ is aligned with the Duke Climate Commitment, which unites the university’s education, research, operations and public service missions to address the climate crisis. The commitment builds on Duke’s longstanding leadership in climate, energy and sustainability to educate and deploy a generation of climate- and sustainability-fluent innovators and create just, equitable solutions for all.
In addition to experiencing all the general educational benefits of the Data+ program, Climate+ students will form a subcohort that engages regularly with climate, environment, and energy researchers and practitioners. Like the broader Data+ program, each Climate+ project team will consist of at most three undergraduates and one graduate student, who will work in a communal environment to learn how to marshal, analyze, and visualize data. Graduate students (including master’s and PhD students) typically serve as project managers, helping their teams stay on track with deliverables and timeline; their compensation may vary.
Climate+ is offered by the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke in partnership with the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability.
Browse our Climate+ projects below.
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2023 Data+ projects have been posted! See the list.
Climate+ Projects
A team of students led by researchers within the Saltwater Intrusion and Sea Level Rise (SWISLR) Research Coordination Network will be tasked with creating a geospatial database summarizing the current extent of SWISLR and the current knowledge on SWISLR within the North American Coastal Plain. Students will be responsible for...
A team of students led by Civil & Environmental Engineering Professor Helen Hsu-Kim will develop a resource reserves database of coal ash wastes stored in hundreds of legacy disposal sites in the United States. The team will extract key information from historical datasets on coal energy production, incorporate geochemical information...
Researchers with the Duke River Center and the Watershed Biogeochemistry Lab will investigate patterns of anoxia, or periods of little to no oxygen, in rivers. Oxygen is a necessary element for many organisms to live in rivers, but researchers know little about the timing, duration, and magnitude of low oxygen...
Interested in using satellites and machine learning to help keep decision-makers better informed about climate change? Interested in learning about cutting-edge computer vision techniques for analyzing satellite imagery and how to scale them up globally? Come join a student team collaborating with the Energy Data Analytics Lab as we democratize...
Students will collaborate with CEE Professors David Carlson and Mike Bergin to model the effects of land use on the urban heat island effect using satellite imagery and ground-level temperature measurements. Students will use machine learning to segment satellite images of Durham, North Carolina by land use. They will then...
A team of students led by researchers in the Hydroclimatological Lab will create a workflow/pipeline for comprehensively estimating the carbon emissions from the Southeastern (SE) United States (US) wetlands using machine learning techniques applied to multi-source data, including field measurements, remote sensing products, and biophysical model outputs. Students will first...
A team of students led by Prof. Zuchuan Li and co-led by Prof. Nicolas Cassar will develop means to estimate the amount of CO2 transferred from the ocean surface to the deep ocean through machine learning techniques applied to satellite data and automatic observations. Students will identify variables that can...
A team of students led by Physics professor Dan Scolnic will collaborate with Duke Dining leadership to provide an in-depth, quantitative accounting of the carbon footprint of the Duke Dining program. Students will use the latest research quantifying CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas emissions for various food types, meals, and sources...
This project is also part of Duke’s first Climate+ cohort. Duke Data+ students, in collaboration with Dr. Emily Bernhardt (faculty advisor) and Audrey Thellman (graduate student) will evaluate how changing ice and snow conditions are impacting river ecosystems through classified ice imagery. Currently, our team has data from 7 field...
This project is also part of Duke’s first Climate+ cohort. A team of students led by researchers in the Hydroclimatological Lab will comprehensively quantify the wetland carbon emissions in the entire Southeast (SE) US using machine learning techniques and various climate datasets—including in situ measurements, remote sensing data, climate observations,...
This project is also part of Duke’s first Climate+ cohort. A student team working with the Energy Data Analytics Lab will work to democratize access to data relevant to climate change mitigation and adaptation planning as well as the underlying models to acquire those data. This project will work towards building the...
This project is also part of Duke’s first Climate+ cohort. A team of students led by researchers at Duke and abroad will develop and evaluate machine learning solutions to model behavioral patterns of electric use, emphasizing data privacy. Data collected in different parts of the world will be analyzed to...
A team of students led by researchers at the Duke Marine Lab will explore the changing distribution of krill around the Antarctic Peninsula. Krill are a key prey species in this ecosystem, supporting a number of animals including whales, seals, and penguins, but they are dependent on winter sea ice...
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