|
Page 2 of 2 
Scientists who are leading the project say that their ultimate goal is to produce a kind of scientific tool kit that planners could use to envision, through the grinding out of a few hundred million equations, multiple versions of the state's future based on land-use and climate trends.
 "Once we get our tools working, we can say, `What if the future of New Jersey 100 years from now is this, or what if it's this other plan — how will that affect the climate?' " Professor Robock said. "We'll be able to do those experiments in the next couple years and maybe that can give information to policy makers that will actually help them decide what the future development will be like."
But there are historical puzzles to be pondered, as well, and that's where the old map and the graduate student figure in.
In the 1880's, Prof. George H. Cook, who later had a college at Rutgers named after him — which, in the fullness of time, came to employ Dr. Robock, among others — led a team of topographers who crisscrossed New Jersey, recording and measuring as they went. In the annals of Victorian-era science, it was an amazing feat that few other states apparently ever attempted or completed. The Cook map — really multiple maps created over nine years — is 17 feet long when fully assembled and only a bit less accurate than a photograph taken from space.
Paul Stuart Wichansky's Ph.D. dissertation is aimed at figuring out how the changes since Professor Cook's time have altered the state's climate. More to the point, he'll be running the same weather through the two very different New Jerseys, really: the current state, captured by satellite, and the version Dr. Cook saw in the 1880's, when farms dominated the landscape.
The computer, stocked with all that science knows about how land conditions can alter wind and water evaporation and runoff and albedo (how different surfaces reflect or retain heat), will replay history.
Mr. Wichansky spent a year in the Rutgers Library creating a digital version of the Cook map that could be fed into the school's climate modeling program. The huge map was divided into 3,774 individual cells, each of which had to be put into the computer one by one. He has just started his computer runs.
"I feel like Prof. George H. Cook is speaking to me through his maps," Mr. Wichansky said.
At the backdrop of the climate work here is the unavoidable reality that a record-breaking warm trend — short-term or long-term, no one can say — is under way. The 12 months through the end of September, in particular, was the warmest in New Jersey since the 1890's. Mr. Wichansky said that part of what he was looking for in his results were clues about how much of that warming effect was a result of atmospheric changes, and how much came from the ground.
"The land cover change project may enable us to quantify how much of this warming may actually be due to changes in the land surface itself as a result of human modifications," he said.
Some New Jersey environmental officials say they think that the results of the Rutgers project will be illuminating about how land and climate fit together, but that information, in the end, might still be problematic.
"It's one thing for the state to say you have to control this amount of polluted runoff," one senior state official said. "It's another to say you have to maintain this forest cover or this result will occur far away. That's not the traditional bailiwick of environmental regulation. We'll have to evolve ourselves to get to that point."
Previous page 1 | 2
Top of Page | 
