Rob Crane

Recent Doctoral Advisees

David McGinnis (Ph.D., 1994) Climate Change and GCM Prediction of Water Resources from Mountain Snowpacks (Asst. Professor, University of Iowa).

Tereza Cavazos (Ph.D., 1998) Synoptic Control on Regional Climate in Northern Mexico (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Arizona).

Publications

Crane, R.G. and M.R. Anderson, 1994. Springtime microwave emissivity changes in the southern Kara Sea. Journal of Geophysical Research, 99(C7): 14,303-14,309.

McGinnis, D.R. and R.G. Crane, 1994. A multivariate analysis of Arctic climate in GCMs. Journal of Climate, 7: 1240-1250.

Hewitson, B.C. and R.G. Crane, 1994. Neural Computing: Applications in Geography, Kluwar Academic Publishers, Dordrecht: 194pp.

Hewitson, B.C. and R.G. Crane, 1996. Climate downscaling techniques and applications. Climate Research, 7: 85-95.

Crane, R.G. and B.C. Hewitson, 1998. CO2 precipitation changes for the Susquehanna basin: Downscaling from the GENESIS general circulation model. International Journal of Climatology, 18: 65-76.

Crane, R.G., B. Yarnal, E. Barron, and B.C. Hewitson, 1999. Scale interactions and regional climate: Examples from the Susquehanna River Basin. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment (in press).

Kump, L.R., J.F. Kasting, and R.G. Crane, 1999. The Earth System. Prentice Hall, New Jersey: 351pp

Current Research Projects

My research interests are in climatology and remote sensing -- more specifically, synoptic climatology, regional climate change and climate downscaling, polar climates and sea ice-atmosphere interactions. My current research projects include:

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Assessment (MARA) of climate change impacts. This is part of the National Assessment of Climate Change (NACC) and is funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Ann Fisher, Principal Investigator).
Global Climate Change Impacts on Water Resources and Ecosystems funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Ann Fisher, Principal Investigator).
Methods in Integrated Regional Assessment funded by the National Science Foundation (Greg Knight, Principal Investigator).

These projects are large interdisciplinary programs that involve a number of researchers in the Department of Geography and other departments across the campus. My role has been to develop methodologies for extracting regional scale information from global climate models (GCMs). The emphasis has been on the use of Artificial Neural Networks to develop non-linear transfer functions between the GCM circulation and humidity fields and the local temperature/precipitation response. Much of this work has been conducted in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Hewitson, University of Cape Town.