Muhammad Altaf Arain
Professor, Geography & Earth Sciences

Dr. M. Altaf Arain is a Professor in the School of Earth, Environment & Society at McMaster University and the founding Director of the McMaster Centre for Climate Change. Dr. Arain holds a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Hydrology at the University of Arizona. He has extensively studied forest ecosystems and their restoration using field measurements and ecosystem and hydrologic models. Dr Arain has established Turkey Point Observatory comprising four flux tower stations in Southern Ontario to examine the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on different-age and different species forest ecosystems. Turkey Point Observatory is part of Global Water Futures (GWF), global Fluxnet, Canadian FloodNet and North American Carbon Program. Dr. Arain has been involved in the development of the coupled Canadian Land Surface Scheme and the Canadian Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (CLASS-CTEM), used in the Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM) for climate predictions. He has also focused on investigating the effects of air pollution and electric mobility adoption on the environment and human health in urban areas in Canada.