Dr. Hugo Beltrami, a professor in StFX’s Department of Earth Sciences, has had his Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Climate Dynamics renewed for an additional seven years. The CRC renewal carries $1.4 million in research funding.
The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, recently announced the government investment of over $139 million to support 176 new and renewed Canada Research Chairs across 46 institutions in Canada.
CRC Tier 1 chairs are awarded to outstanding researchers acknowledged by their peers as world leaders in their fields. Dr. Beltrami has held a Tier 1 CRC in Climate Dynamics since 2015.
The focus of Dr. Beltrami’s CRC program for the next seven years will be on characterization of the heat and mass transfer regime between the lower atmosphere and the first few hundred meters of the Earth’s crust. The proposed program is articulated around four axes: (1) Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI): The Temperature of the Earth. (2) Paleoclimate Modelling (3) Evolution of Permafrost (4) Land from Space.
“The renewal of Dr. Beltrami’s Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Climate Dynamics for a further seven-year period signifies the internationally recognized impact of the research he and his students have undertaken in an effort to understand heat exchange near the Earth’s surface,” says Dr. Richard Isnor, StFX Associate Vice-President Research & Graduate Studies.
The fundamental quantity for understanding how our planet’s climate will change in the future and how sensitive Earth’s climate is to increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses (GHG), is the change in Earth’s energy content and its evolution over time.
Dr. Beltrami studies the excess energy retained by the Earth due to increased atmospheric GHGs. Uncertainty in the Earth’s Energy Imbalance (or EEI) is one of the most urgent issues hindering the proper evaluation of future climate change.
One of the new dimensions of Dr. Beltrami’s research will be the use of satellite data to estimate land heat fluxes. Data, from above and below the earth’s surface, will be put into land surface and regional climate models to study phenomena near the ground with potential global climate feedbacks.
Dr. Beltrami is also part of a major new research group (involving researchers from 13 Canadian universities) partnering with the Canadian Space Agency and Environment and Climate Change Canada called HAWC (High Altitude Water Vapour and Clouds). Results of this research will contribute to assessing Global Climate Models’ future projections.
Dr. Beltrami has been at StFX since 1995 and he is a full professor associated with the Climate & Atmospheric Sciences Institute, the Climate & Environment Program, and the Department of Earth Sciences. He is an internationally recognized expert in the area of Subsurface Climatology and considered a foremost authority in the field of continental energy and climate of the past from geothermal data. Dr. Beltrami’s research interests and approach are multidisciplinary and extend from the classical data collection for heat flow and paleoclimate research as well as physically based applications, to modelling the processes involved in energy transfers at boundary between the air and the shallow underground.
