Introduction

In 2005, IGES established CREW, a second center of excellence dedicated to basic research on the Earth's water cycle and how changes in this cycle impact the global environment. CREW aligns itself with the overarching mission and goals of IGES and works in concert with its sister center, COLA.

In 2008 CREW expanded its team to 12 members (including students) and currently has several funded projects underway. CREW performs "water cycle research making a difference" through a progressive path of deriving knowledge from water and energy cycle observations, transitioning this knowledge into useful prediction skill, and demonstrating these research results in real-world solutions.

CREW’s unique niche: PROJECT vs CENTER
Ideally, a research center like CREW should clearly focus on a central project to which everyone can contribute, and has the potential of being bigger/better than the sum of its parts. The framework however is not yet fully realized in our current paradigm of project-based funding. Therefore, CREW is working along parallel paths to achieve the benefits of being a center.

An overview of CREW is further explained in this 41-page (6.2Mb) PDF-format file.

Mission

Our mission is to quantify and predict water cycle and environmental consequences of earth system variability and change through focused research investments in observation, modeling, and application. More about CREW's mission

Vision

It is our vision to integrate research across traditional disciplines in an end-to-end program that transitions theoretical research to academic/public education and real-world application, through partnerships with universities, government, and international agencies. The center goal of improved and applicable predictions of the water and energy cycles will require decisive progression from observations to improved understanding and modeling, and eventually to better prediction and application. To focus CREW on making decisive progress toward quantifying and predicting water cycle and environmental consequences of earth system variability and change, we adopt three central CREW elements:

1. Observation
2. Modeling & Prediction, and
3. Solutions.

We establish a progressive path from deriving knowledge from water and energy cycle observations that can be transitioned into useful prediction skill, and demonstrated in practical end-use solutions.

Capabilities

CREW is interested and able to provide research/data services for non-federal government clients. To this end, we have leveraged recognized computing standards with both open source and proprietary software products running on high-end computing platforms. We believe that the information and modeling that CREW does has a potentially large economic value, from guiding environmental and water sensitive investments (mutual/hedge funds), to providing assessments on weather, flood and drought risk to policymakers and the insurance industry.
CREW capabilities include:

• Data
• Science
• Technology
• Program Management
• Meeting Planning
• Educational Outreach

Connections

CREW is tightly integrated with the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere studies program under the IGES umbrella and draws heavily from expertise at George Mason University Department of Climate Dynamics and Climate Education.

View our brochure.

Partners

The Center for Research on Environment & Water depends upon cooperative efforts to further global knowledge of Earths' water and energy cycle. CREW embraces its partners and the scientific community through:

• Hosting students, visitors, and seminars
• Making data, models, papers, etc. freely and openly available
• Extensive use of standard computing protocols (such as ftp, http,...) to make results publicly available
• Carefully limiting response to proposal solicitations, in coordination with partners
• Partnering with operational centers to improve their prediction, rather then developing own operational prediction capacity.

To see the full list of CREW's partners please visit our Partners Page.

Education

Opportunities exist at CREW, and should be exploited, to transition theoretical research to academic/public education through demonstrated team work. Therefore, our educational goal is to have CREWs products be a trusted source of information, open to exploration, inquiry, and discovery, preparing the next generation.

CREW Strategic Education Plan (PDF 26K)

People

Principal Investigator	Shukla, Dr. J.	301-595-7000	wren at iges.org
Director	Gates, Dr.Lydia	301-595-7000	gates at iges.org
Student/Researcher	Arsenault,Kristi	240-247-1446	kristi at iges.org
Postdoc Researcher	De Lannoy, Gabriëlle	301-931-7295	gdlannoy at iges.org
SysAdmin & Web	Larko, C. Megan	301-931-7299	larkoc at iges.org
Research Scientist	Shrestha, Roshan	240-247-1447	roshan at iges.org
Research Scientist	Su, Hongbo	240-247-1445	hongbo at iges.org
Office Coordinator	Whittington, Lois	240-247-1441	lois at iges.org
Student/Researcher	Yilmaz, Tugrul	301-937-7607	tugrul at iges.org

Last Updated: 17 October 2008