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The majority of Vermont residents would pay to protect the state’s water quality, according to a University of Vermont survey released last month. But the public’s interest in paying to conserve water falls short of estimates pegging cleanup efforts at hundreds of millions of dollars.

The UVM study found residents would pay at least $40 per year through an increase to the state’s motor vehicle registration fee and water utility fee. Together, the state could raise $15.9 million annually for cleanup and conservation efforts, the report found.

“Is it enough? No,” said Chris Koliba, a professor at the University of Vermont and contributor to the report. “As a common asset, clean water is actually a lot more valuable to us than we give it credit for.”

Vermont Public Radio
Report Finds Vermonters Willing To Give Up (Not Enough) Green To Improve ...
Vermont Public Radio
"We are looking at this is a glass half-full," said Professor Chris Koliba, who worked on the report. "That you have 65 percent of the population that are willing to pay $40, and of that 65, there's a significant percentage that's willing to pay even ...

New Report: Vermonters Willing to Pay for Lake Champlain Clean-up
UVM News
A new report by the Vermont EPSCoR Adaptation to Climate Change in the Lake Champlain Basin (RACC) project found that Vermonters rank water quality as a top public policy priority and are willing to pay to improve the health of Vermont's waterways.

The Leaves of Green workshop is an opportunity for high school teachers and students to explore how carbon is assimilated and partitioned by plants and how these processes affect agriculture, global climate change, and biofuel production.

The High School Program offers students and teachers the opportunity to participate in current research. Through involvement in the Research on Adaptation to Climate Change (RACC) research program, participants develop skills in scientific methods and Earth systems thinking and experience what it is like to be a scientist.

RACC Seminar 11-24-2014

Dr. Shaver of the Marine Biological Laboratories, Ecosystems Center discussed hisresearch work on Climate Change in the Artic.

US-China pact is step forward
Rutland Herald
... United States — as well as other countries like Canada and Australia, who are retreating from climate action. Alan Betts is a leading climate scientist who works with Atmospheric Research in Pittsford. He can be reached through his web-site ...

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The National Science Foundation Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR) has announced the following Track-2 funding opportunities:
Call for LOI and Pre-Proposals - UVM Specific RII Track-2 FEC - NSF EPSCoR
Call for Proposals - NSF EPSCoR RII Track-2 FEC

Tuesday, January 27, at 5:00pm
Waterman Memorial Lounge
Title: Climate Justice and Vulnerability: Learning from Katrina, Irene, and Sandy

Synopsis: Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Sandy were historic, not only in leading to billion-dollar disasters across the U.S., but also for the vulnerabilities they revealed both culturally and socioeconomically. Ten years later, are we better equipped to prepare for and respond to climate hazards, especially in the face of a changing climate?

Two SBIR/STTR funding workshops were conducted in Burlington and Bennington on November 4th and 6th, 2014. Ms. Karen West was the keynote presenter. Karen West owns C & P Management Services, LLC, in Washington, Maine, a small, woman- and veteran-owned business that provides strategic business management assistance to small and large businesses. With concentrated expertise in purchasing, proposal management, and contract management services, Karen has over twenty-six years of business experience including government and civilian contracting, subcontracting, and supply management. She has had hands-on, in-depth experience from small purchases to complex multi-million dollar environmental, electronic, aerospace, and R&D proposal preparation, contract negotiation, and administration for both small and large businesses with an emphasis on the Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program.

UVM Shares Expertise with Policy-Makers at Climate Change Summit
UVM News
Session titles ranged from "The Rising Risk of Flood Events from Climate Change," with Arne Bomblies, civil and environmental engineering professor, and Rob Evans, river corridor and floodplain manager at the Department of Environmental Conservation ...

Google News

RACC researchers play key role at Legislative Policy Summit on Climate Change at the University of Vermont
The University of Vermont (UVM) sponsored its second annual legislative summit on November 18, 2014. This year’s summit focused on Climate Change and brought together over 40 legislators to campus. Approximately 150 faculty, UVM Graduate Students, Vermont Agency representative and invited community members from various Non-Government Organizations also attended.

A recent report by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources has indicated that approximately $156 million is needed annually for the next ten years for the State of Vermont to meet its obligations under the Clean Water Act, though confidence has declined in this estimate. Recent public opinion polling indicates that the most publicly-acceptable means for raising funds are through one-time development fees and annual stormwater fees. Further polling indicates that the median willingness to pay among Vermont households is $40 per year, when raised through water utility and vehicle registration fees. The polling also suggests that willingness to pay could be increased through outreach and education.

This analysis uses over 50 years of hourly observations of temperature, relative humidity, and opaque cloud cover and daily precipitation from 11 climate stations across the Canadian Prairies to analyze the monthly, seasonal and long-term climate coupling in the warm season. On climate timescales, temperature depends on cloud forcing, while relative humidity depends on precipitation. The monthly climate depends on both opaque cloud cover for the current month and precipitation for both the present and past 2 months in summer. Multiple linear regression shows that anomalies of opaque cloud and precipitation explain 60-80% of the variance in the diurnal temperature range, afternoon relative humidity and lifting condensation level on monthly timescales. We analyze the internal coupling of diurnal climate observables as a further guide to evaluating models. We couple the statistics to simplified energy and water budgets for the Prairies in the growing season. The opaque cloud observations have been calibrated against the incoming shortwave and longwave fluxes. We estimate that the dry-down of total water storage on the landscape damps 56% of precipitation anomalies for the growing season on large spatial scales, although this drydown increases evapotranspiration. This couples the climatological surface fluxes to four key observables: cloud forcing, precipitation, temperature and humidity. We estimate a climatological evaporative fraction of 0.61 for the Prairies. The observational relationships of the coupled Prairie climate system across timescale will be useful for evaluating these coupled processes in models for weather and seasonal forecasting and climate simulation.

A Paper entitled "Mining Patterns in Big Data K-H Networks" written by RACC Postdoc Ahmed Abdeen Hamed, Xindong Wu and Tamer Fandy won the Runner-up for Best Paper Award at the 11th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA 2014) in Doha, Qatar on November 10th 2014.
The paper presents a novel network model, called K-H Networks (short for Keyword-Hashtag Networks), which is designed for Big Data social media environments (e.g., Twitter). The networks are mined using a novel algorithm, which we call HashnetMiner, also presented in the paper. The algorithm mines the networks for patterns for the purpose of exposing links and discoveries. The K-H Networks were tested on contents from sentiments, drugs, cars and healthcare industry. Currently, Dr. Hamed is exploring climate change and water quality related keywords/hashtags in Vermont's twitter data using the K-H Networks and HashnetMiner.

Dr. Alan Betts was invited to participate on a climate change panel at the VT Commons School on October 29, 2014, following a showing of the film 'Disruption'. He reported that after the discussion, "A senior student came up to me afterwards with a very enthusiastic: "Thank-you so much! You will not remember me, but three years ago, when I was a shy 15-yr-old girl with a watershed poster at an EPScoR conference, you stopped and discussed it with me for 20-mins. I knew then I wanted to become a scientist!"
The event also included a showing of "Disruption" dealing with the Sept 21, 2014 Peoples Climate March in NYC - which Dr. Betts also participated in.
http://vermontcommons.org/2014/10/disruption/

Free Workshop for Local Entrepreneurs, Dec.11 in Winooski
Winooski, Vt.—On Thursday, Dec. 11, the Vermont Small Business Development
Center (VtSBDC) is hosting a free workshop for regional businesses and entrepreneurs. The session, which will focus on “How to Commercialize Your Idea,” is being held from 10 a.m. to noon at the Community College of Vermont in Winooski.
This is the second workshop that’s being held in Winooski to help local innovators who are creating new technologies and would like the know-how to bring their ideas to the marketplace. Scott Holson, VtSBDC’s technology commercialization advisor, will talk about how to bring an idea to fruition and locate funding through a variety of grant programs.

The VT EPSCoR RACC seminar series featured Dr. Chris Danforth, the Flint Professor of Mathematical, Natural, and Technical Sciences at UVM and co-director the Center of Complex Systems at UVM. He presented his work in: Remote Sensing of Emotional States in Real-Time -- http://hedonometer.org.

New England Water Resource Network (NEWRnet) Undergraduate Summer Internship Applications are now being accepted. Complete applications are due by 4:00pm eastern on February 20, 2015

Tech@Bennington sparks dialogue among entrepreneurial community
Bennington Banner
BENNINGTON >> DB McKenna, Global-Z International and the Bennington Young Professionals teamed up to sponsor a set of educational workshops built around the Small Business Technology Transfer, the University of Vermont's EPSCOR grant and other ...