about the lab

Human well-being is intrinsically tied to the environment and is particularly sensitive to weather and climate. These influences can be seen on a daily basis as the local weather forecast informs our choices of what to wear and what activities to engage in. Less trivially, phenomena such as tropical cyclones can destroy cities and severe droughts can cripple economies and destabilize entire political systems. In addition to weather and climate impacting society, humans now have a first order influence on weather and climate via emissions of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants. These two-way interactions influence each other via a myriad of complex pathways.

The Weather, Climate and Human Systems Lab under the department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San José State University takes a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to studying the interactions between society and the earth system. In particular we investigate how the atmosphere, ocean, land, and economic structures interrelate in multifaceted, multidirectional, nonlinear ways. Our research extends from the purely physical sciences to studies that include a significant social science aspect and it spans spatiotemporal scales from daily and regional to centennial and global.