Muhammad Altaf Arain
Professor, Earth, Environment & Society

Dr. M. Altaf Arain is a Professor in the School of Earth, Environment & Society and an associate member of the Department of Civil Engineering at McMaster University. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and M.Sc. and Ph.D degrees in Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He has served as the founding director of the McMaster Centre for Climate change from 2010 to 2024 and had been the Science Research Chair in Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change. His research interests include hydrometeorology; climatology, evapotranspiration, forest and agricultural carbon and water cycles and ecosystem, watershed and global climate models.

Dr. Arain has established a multidisciplinary ecosystem restoration and environmental sustainability research program that explores the interactions and feedbacks between biogeochemical and hydrologic cycles in forest ecosystems and agricultural crops. As part of this program, he has established Turkey Point Environmental Observatory, comprising five flux tower stations near Lake Erie in Southern Ontario, which are part of Global Water Futures (GWF), Ameriflux, global Fluxnet and US-Canada Global Centre programs. Using ground based (eddy covariance, soil CO2 efflux, sapflow systems) and airborne (e.g. drone and satellite remote sensing) his group is exploring carbon sequestration capabilities, water use and sensitivity and resilience of plantation or managed forests and crops to future climate change and extreme weather events.

Dr. Arain’s group has been involved in the development of the Canadian Land Surface Scheme Including Biogeochemical Cycles (CLASSIC) used in the Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM) for climate predictions and integrated biogeochemical and hydrologic modelling systems (MESH-CLASSIC) for catchment-scale studies. He has published more than 200 peer-review journal papers and has been listed among Clarivate Analytics-Web of Science top 1% Highly-Cited Researchers in science and social science.
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