The Department of Environment, Planning and Sustainability
The Department of Physics
The Department of Information Science
Storm Chasers
A team of Bar-Ilan researchers is working across disciplines to discover how extreme weather events are connected across space and time—and with plenty of the latter to batten down the hatches.
Fire and Ice
Call it the global version of musical chairs, albeit with higher stakes: When a strong El Nino event brings wetter winters to Arizona and California, the drought-wracked states celebrate. Yet the same periods of unusually warm water in the eastern Pacific Ocean may result in devastating flooding in Argentina and Paraguay. While the interrelated effects of weather events such as El Nino—what climatologists calls “teleconnections”—are by now well understood, less clear is whether they’re a feature of all extreme weather events. To determine if and how spatial connections develop between such events in remote regions, a team including Dr. Tom Goren of the Department of Environment, Planning and Sustainability, Israel Prize laureate Prof. Shlomo Havlin of the Department of Physics, and Dr. Louis Shekhtman of the Department of Information Science received a $1.5 million grant last year from Israel’s Council for Higher Education. Together with researchers from the Weizmann Institute, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the Volcani Institute, they will combine Goren’s expertise in climatology, Havlin’s in network science, and Shekhtman’s in AI and machine learning to develop a framework for identifying and modeling teleconnections into the future. Ultimately, they hope their framework will help protect environments, economies, and most important—lives.
Dr. Louis Shekhtman
Prof. Shlomo Havlin
Dr. Tom Goren
As part of the same grant, the team will also study the implications of Marine Cloud Brightening, a method that increases clouds’ reflection of solar radiation in order to cool the planet, and of land-use changes such as deforestation on weather events. “Alongside the results of this research, which we hope will lead to societies’ preparedness, the project can demonstrate the power of collaboration across disciplines,” says Goren, who explains that this research could never be conducted by a single scientist working within a single field. “Like El Nino,” he adds with a smile, “real innovations are rarely single weather events.”
