AmStat Section News,
March 2008

Devin S. Johnson, Publications Chair

Upcoming ENVR Workshop
What: Statistical Issues in Monitoring the Environment
When: Oct. 22-24, 2008
Where: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colorado

This workshop covers state-of-the-art applications and statistical methods in environmental monitoring. Sessions on applications include monitoring in ecology, monitoring in air quality, monitoring of aquatic resources, monitoring of climate change and its impacts. The spatio-temporal data collected in environmental monitoring present some interesting and challenging statistical problems such as modeling of space-time correlation, analysis of the huge amount of correlated data, and analysis of high frequency monitoring data. Technical sessions will cover recent developments in statistical methods for environmental data.  A one-day short course on the analysis of spatial and spatio-temporal data will be offered and taught by Doug Nychka. There will also be a poster session and the poster abstracts need to be submitted by September 23, 2008. For more information, visit http://www.stat.purdue.edu/envr/ or contact Hao Zhang, Department of Statistics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906:(765)496-9548; zhanghao@purdue.edu.

Update on the Climate Change Workshop Held by ENVR and SPA
Mary Christman and David Marker

In October 2007, ENVR and the ASA Science and Public Affairs Advisory Committee (SPA) cosponsored a two-day workshop bringing together 15-20 leading statisticians and atmospheric scientists, hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The workshop was facilitated by Dr. David Marker, Chair of SPA and Dr. Mary Christman, then Chair of the ASA Section on Statistics and the Environment. The program was facilitated by Drs. Richard Smith and Doug Nychka. The impetus for this workshop came from the need for the American Statistical Association, which has not been involved in the past at an institutional level, to develop a public position on the subject of climate change, as has been done in the past on a number of other public-policy issues involving statistics. The objective of the workshop was to ensure that ASA received input from researchers involved in climate change research in order to develop a position. The major result of the workshop was a white paper on the role of statistics in climate change, including future areas of research that was adopted by the ASA Board of Directors and released in December 2007. In the announcement the ASA endorses the findings in the recently published Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They further identify several areas ripe for statistical research and input into the controversy surrounding human impacts on climate change. For more information on the importance of the role of statisticians in climate change research as described in the position paper, see http://www.amstat.org/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=climatechange.

In addition to the workshop held last year, ENVR is sponsoring several activities at this year’s Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver related to increasing awareness of statistical activities in climate change research. Two invited sessions are scheduled, The Role of Statisticians in Understanding Climate Change, August 6, 2008 at 10:30 am, and Statistical Aspects of Regional Climate Modeling, August 7, 2008 at 8:30 am. ENVR is also sponsoring roundtables for more intimate discussions of statistical input to the climate change controversy. Be sure to check out the program for 2008 JSM and plan to attend one or more of the activities.