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The Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling (CENSAM) has been established under the auspices of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) in January 2008, with support from the Singapore National Research Foundation. CENSAM brings together a multidisciplinary team of MIT faculty with researchers from Singaporean academic institutions and industry. More information about CENSAM and SMART can be found here.


One of the broad research goals for CENSAM is to achieve integrated modeling of Singapore’s environment, from the microscale (at the level of individual constructed facilities, 1-10 km), to the mesoscale of the city-state of Singapore (10-100 km) and the macroscale of the wider biosphere-atmosphere-ocean coupled system (at the regional scale, hundreds to thousands of kilometers).


Within this framework, the Eltahir Research Group will be undertaking research to better understand the regional climate of the Maritime Continent, the patchwork of islands and oceans that constitutes the archipelago portion of Southeast Asia. The specific objectives of this work are still under development, but current questions of interest are:

•Which land surface characteristics is the regional climate of the Maritime Continent most sensitive to, and on what temporal and spatial scales?

•How do deforestation and land cover conversion affect these sensitivities?

•Can we use this understanding of sensitivity to landscape characteristics to predict the influence of global warming on the climate of this region?


The project will incorporate ground observations from new field sites (to be established) and remote sensing data with the use of a high resolution regional coupled biosphere-atmosphere model. Please check back here for future updates as this project develops.





-graduate students on this project:   Rebecca Gianotti

Average January TRMM rainfall (mm/day) for the Maritime Continent.