The Braudy Foundation – founded by Bob Braudy ’65, M.Eng. ’66, and his wife, Judi – has committed to funding a second five-year phase of a collaboration between Cornell’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) and Northern Arizona University (NAU) that will use drones to chase dust storms and learn about their effects on the atmosphere.
The research will be led by Toby Ault, associate professor in EAS in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Nick McKay, associate professor at NAU, who made important breakthroughs in the first phase of the Braudy-funded project. Over the past four years, the Cornell-NAU team discovered new dimensions of dust, drought, land use and climate change on the southern Colorado Plateau. The high elevation of the region – which includes portions of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah – makes the area particularly vulnerable to climate change and has been the focus of many climate scientists.
At NAU, McKay and Steph Arcusa, an early-career scientist funded by the project, developed new paleoclimate lake records that defy standard models of how the atmosphere picks up dust from the land surface and deposits it downstream. Ault and Carlos Carrillo, a Cornell postdoctoral associate funded by the project, introduced new methodologies for simulating the large-scale effects of drought and dust in the region using numerical models of the global circulation.
Phase I of the project revealed the counterintuitive result that dusty periods in the U.S. Southwest did not correlate with pre-industrial periods of drought.
“The NAU team started finding these really clear dust deposits,” Ault said, “and at first I thought, ‘Exactly, megadrought,’ but then it turned out that, no, we just don’t really understand what’s controlling dust emissions in that region during pre-industrial times.”