University of Hawaii scores $20M for climate research, data science

The University of Hawaii is getting set to turbocharge its climate change research with the power of computers following a $20 million award from the National Science Foundation.

The five-year grant will underwrite Change HI, a project that aims to not only advance climate research, but help the university and the state upgrade their data science capacity while nudging the islands toward a more high-tech economy.

For the project, some 40 faculty members will conduct climate science, data science, build the university’s cyber infrastructure and teach researchers and community members how to incorporate data science in their research.

“Climate science is an area of vital importance to Hawaii, where we have remarkable expertise across the UH system,” UH President David Lassner told the Board of Regents on Thursday. He said data science is an area where “if you had asked me five years ago, I would have said we were weak.”

Since then, data science faculty have been hired at both UH Hilo and UH Manoa in an effort to build capacity in the system.

“Yes, we were behind, but we’re racing to catch up as fast as we can,” said Gwen Jacobs, Information Technology Services director of cyber infrastructure and principal investigator for Change HI.

In fact, three new data science faculty members will be hired through the Change HI program alone, she said.

For the project, climate researchers will incorporate the power of computers in eight separate science areas to simulate, model and predict the changes expected in the next five to 50 years, Jacobs said.

Some of the topic areas include rainfall, cloud water captured by plants, soil moisture characterization as it relates to flooding and drought, and carbon sequestration, the process of capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

All of the researchers will have at their disposal an arsenal of advanced data science techniques such as computational simulations, data visualization, natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and statistical modeling.

As part of the project, the finished science and data will be made available to the public through the Hawaii Data Portal, an open-source online platform for climate data and information which was created by UH just a few months ago.

In addition to the climate science, Change HI will be helping to ramp up the university’s data science capacity as well as the state’s capacity by offering computer education to the entire community. The plan not only calls for new graduate fellowships, summer undergraduate research experiences and internships, but for creation of new data science classes, certificate programs and workshops open to the public.

“Not only is climate science important to everybody across the state, but data science is one of those areas that is important to hospitals, banks, to insurance companies, to academia in support of our mission and to innovation when we look to startups,” Lassner said.

Jacobs said officials named the initiative Change HI because it is all about change — the change expected via climate change and the change that will make Hawaii less reliant on tourism and more resilient with a modern, knowledge- based economy.

“COVID taught us we can’t rely on tourism. It was scary to see how much we depended on those dollars,” she said.

Change HI aims to help create the highly skilled, data-ready workforce that will power Hawaii’s future economy.

“Instead of our graduates going to Facebook and Google, maybe they can stay right here,” Jacobs explained.

The effort, she said, also seeks to make opportunities available to everyone in a bid to strengthen the university’s support for equity and inclusion.

And UH isn’t doing this alone. Listed as participating organizations are Chaminade University, Island of Opportunity Pacific Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, Hawaii IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence, the UH LGBTQ+ Center and UH Office of Innovation and Commercialization, Waianae Mountains Watershed Partnership, Hawaii State Energy Office and Hawaii Community Foundation.