UT Enrolls First Students in Climate System Science Major

By Daniel Oberhaus in 40 Acres, Sept | Oct 2024 on September 1, 2024 at 1:19 am | No Comments

In early July, Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas and tore north through the state, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. The earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane ever recorded, Beryl took a direct hit on Houston, unleashing torrential flooding and an outbreak of tornadoes that left millions without power for days. By the time the storm dissipated, it had caused billions of dollars in damage and left dozens of Texans dead.  

Beryl was a record-breaking storm in many respects, but it’s also indicative of the “new normal.” Texas, in particular, has become a microcosm for the types of extreme weather events that are becoming increasingly common across the world as a result of climate change. Just in the past few years, the Lone Star State has experienced hurricanes, flooding, deep freezes, droughts, and wildfires that rank among the worst in its history. The bad news is that this type of extreme weather is likely to get worse. A sobering report released earlier this year by the nonprofit Texas 2036 projected significant rises in average temperatures, hurricane storm surges, extreme rainfall, and wildfires over the next decade.   

The good news is that UT is taking bold steps to equip the next generation of climate scientists with the skills they need to tackle these problems head-on and help the world adapt to a future defined by climate extremes.  

This fall, UT enrolled the first cohort of students in a new undergraduate program in climate system science, which is one of the only climate science majors offered by a U.S. university.  The multidisciplinary program is housed within the Jackson School of Geosciences and aims to provide students with a rigorous scientific foundation while also imparting practical skills to address real-world climate challenges. The curriculum spans physics, chemistry, biology, statistics, and specialized climate science courses and provides extensive training in climate modeling and data analysis.   

“One of the things we’re increasingly seeing across the public and private sector is that every organization is starting to see the impact of climate change on their operations, whether it’s local city governments or international reinsurance companies,” says assistant professor of climate science Geeta Persad, who worked with climate science professor Kerry Cook over the past two years to develop the new program. “These organizations are really hungry for people with technical knowledge about climate change who understand how to work with climate data so they can be more strategic about how to reduce the impacts of climate change. Giving students that technical basis in climate system science is going to help build that workforce that’s really missing right now.”    

The climate systems that drive extreme weather phenomena are, by nature, wickedly complex and result from the interaction of several environmental components such as the atmosphere, glaciers, oceans, rivers, lakes, forests, farmland, and human activities. This means that UT students preparing for a career in climate system science must have broad exposure to each of these scientific disciplines as well as formal training in the techniques and tools to apply their scientific knowledge to real-world problems.    

“This isn’t just about equipping students with the tool to tackle their next job because we’re living in a rapidly evolving world in terms of the availability of climate data,” says Danny Stockli, chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “We’re trying to equip our students with the tools they need to reinvent themselves to tackle the next problem and ensure they’re addressing socially relevant issues. So we’re focused on the science, of course, but we’re also really harping on developing their computational skills, so they can deal with real data rather than only looking at pre-digested climate data.”  

The new program makes UT one of only a handful of universities in the United States to offer a climate science program for undergraduates. UCLA launched the first undergraduate climate science program in 2019, and Columbia University followed with its own climate system major last year.    

“The student demand for undergraduate training in climate system science has really accelerated, and it makes sense because this generation of students are living with the impacts of climate change,” Persad says. “There were a lot of ways for them to get a broad introduction to climate change through sustainability programs or environmental science majors, but there wasn’t scope within those programs for them to build a technical understanding about the computational tools that are now critical for climate science.”   

UT is uniquely equipped for such an ambitious multidisciplinary undergraduate program in many ways. The Jackson School of Geosciences is full of faculty with deep climate expertise; UT is home to Frontera, the fastest supercomputer of any university and an important asset for climate modeling; and Texas is already feeling the acute impacts of climate change–driven extreme weather events, which dramatically underscore the importance of what students are learning in the classroom.   

“It was kind of a no-brainer that a place like UT should have a program like this,” Persad says. “The University attracts so many excellent students with diverse backgrounds from around the world, and it really should be home to studying an issue like climate change that is so impactful here in Texas.”    

The first cohort to enroll in the program is relatively small—just a few dozen students—but this is by design. This will give faculty the flexibility they need to develop and evaluate the new curriculum as the program scales while ensuring that the students are highly trained and prepared to enter the workforce when they graduate. Stockli says he anticipates the program’s curriculum to continuously evolve to keep pace with the rapid developments in climate science as a field.   

Several new courses have already been developed for the program, such as an atmospheric science course that allows undergraduates to study the chemical and physical dynamics of Earth’s weather systems for the first time. When combined with technical training in programming languages like Python and other data analysis tools, Stockli says students should emerge prepared for whatever the world throws at them as far as climate change is concerned.   

“We have a responsibility to teach the next generation of scientists and develop the workforce to address these really important challenges that affect Texas, the United States, and the entire world,” Stockli says. “This is a program that has to evolve with the weather, so to speak, because we want to make sure that they’re well-rounded and capable geoscientists who can embrace any challenges that come their way.”

CREDIT: Veronica Cerri