M. Altaf Arain is a professor in the School of Earth, Environment & Society at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Arain obtained his MSc and PhD degrees from the Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA. He was a NASA Global Change Research Fellow (ESS program) and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia and the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth, The University of Arizona. He has established Turkey Point Observatory which comprising five flux stations in Southern Ontario, Canada. It includes an age-sequence (80, 46 and 18 year-old) of planted pine forests since 2003, a managed deciduous (90-year old) forest since 2012 and an agricultural site, started in June 2020. Dr. Arain is investigating the carbon sequestration potential of these different-age conifer and deciduous forests and exploring how these carbon and water cycles of forests will respond to future climate change and extreme weather events. He is also assessing how different forest management treatments (e.g. variable retention harvesting) will impact the forest growth trajectory, energy exchanges, hydrological processes in response to future climatic stresses and extreme events. This work is utilizing ground based (e.g. eddy covariance, soil CO2 efflux, sapflow, biometric) and airborne (e.g. drone and satellite remote sensing) measurements as well as ecosystem and hydrologic models. He has worked to further develop coupled Canadian Land Surface Scheme and the Canadian Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (CLASS-CTEM-N+). CLASS-CTEM is used in the Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM) for climate predictions.
Research Interests: Bio- and hydro-meteorology, catchment-scale hydrology, ecosystem models, forest carbon and water cycles and eddy covariance technique.
