written by Kirk Johnson, 24 October 2002
Copyright ©2002, The New York Times, a Gannett newspaper
New York, New York

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Scientists who study climate change can sometimes sound as if they have their heads in the clouds, with all the talk of invisible gases and nefarious hydrocarbons. Here, the search for atmospheric explanation is more down to earth.

A team of scientists at Rutgers University is looking at the land in New Jersey — the transition from farms and forests to strip malls and subdivisions — for clues about the state's weather in the past, and how future development could affect the climate 100 years from now.

"How would our local weather be different with a different land use?" said Alan Robock, a professor of meteorology who is leading the multidisciplinary team of urban planners, historians and biologists. "That's the question."

It's certainly not news that what's on the ground has an impact on what's in the sky. Deforestation in the Amazon has been studied for years in South America. Scientists have also shown how cities can often generate their own weather, creating so-called heat islands that spawn storms or change the paths of storms that come along. A parking lot absorbs heat differently, and channels water runoff differently, than a golf course.

But researchers say that the Rutgers study is one of the most ambitious attempts in the nation to pull all those strings together into one regional model. Half of the project looks back at how population growth and the sprawl of development over the last century have made for a different weather pattern.

An astonishingly detailed 17-foot-long map of New Jersey created in the 1880's figures in that part of the story, along with a hard-working graduate student. The project's other half looks forward, at how the state's communities and residents could be affected by long-term climate change as a result of local land-use decisions in years to come.

The idea is not that New Jersey is an island, the researchers say, making its own little weather in splendid isolation, or that the global atmospheric system doesn't matter, but rather that in the end, weather and climate is like politics: it's all local. People and climate connect not in equations or theories, but on the ground.

"Say you build a new 100-acre development and then you get 10 inches less precipitation than normal — what will be the effect of that?" said Ying Fan Reinfelder, an assistant professor of geology who is working on the water-flow portion of the climate model. "What's the effect on ground water, and on stream flow? One side of this is climate; the other are man-made changes. We want to link them."

The Rutgers project, which is partly financed by the state's Department of Environmental Protection, has huge potential implications for the debate about open space and suburban sprawl, state officials and environmentalists say. If a housing development or a new shopping center can be scientifically linked to regionwide effects on water supply or weather, for example, then the battles over development and zoning that now seem purely local will be transformed. Regulators and courts will have a powerful new scientific tool, they say, as global warming becomes an aspect of urban planning becomes an aspect of politics.

"We've long known that better land-use practices reduce the costs of cleaning up our water and cleaning up our air," said Bradley M. Campbell, New Jersey's commissioner of environmental protection. "This work makes clear that good land-use policy is essential to stabilizing our long-term climate, as well."

Environmentalists say that the interconnections are the key, because the model is expected to show how residents many miles from a proposed development project can be affected by something they had perhaps never even heard of.

[Gov. James E. McGreevey struck a similar note on Tuesday, when he told a conference on so-called smart growth that state government — from transportation to economic development — would coordinate to fight the sprawl that he said threatened New Jersey's future.]

"A study like this can really change the way we think about land use in New Jersey," said Barbara L. Lawrence, executive director of New Jersey Future, a research and planning organization that focuses on development issues. "To the extent that science can document changes that go way beyond the border of a municipality, you can build a case for more regional planning."

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