Michael Bliss Singer

Welcome to my research home page!  

I am a Lecturer in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff University, and a Researcher at the Earth Research Institute at University of California Santa Barbara.

On this page you will find links to various aspects of my research. Below there are some photos of research sites and my Twitter feed.  I am always looking for new members of my research group, so do not hesitate to contact me. I currently have several PhD and post-doc opportunities to work on new projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense's Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP). Please send me email, if you are interested to apply.

Research Focus: There are major uncertainties in environmental science regarding the impact of humans and climate on water resources, hydrologic fluxes, erosion, the sustainability and health of forests, and the fate and transport of contaminants. This is my research domain. I investigate environmental science problems from the perspectives of hydrology and geomorphology, with particular attention to how climate and humans force the hydrologic cycle and associated processes near the Earth's surface.

Earth surface processes include the time-varying elements of the hydrologic cycle, sediment transport, and the landforms they produce at or near the land surface. These impact water resources, ecological functioning, biogeochemical processing of nutrients/contaminants, hazards/risks to human society at multiple scales, and landscape evolution.

Climatic forcing refers to the effects of climate under stationary (non-changing) conditions or due to nonstationary climate change.  The expression of climatic forcing inherently has spatial and temporal components, affecting the hydrologic cycle and Earth surface processes in ways that typically confound prediction.

Anthropogenic forcing  indicates that landscapes are often affected by external human-induced perturbations such as engineering (e.g., dams, channelization) and industrial activities (e.g., mining, pollution), which may produce localized or basin-scale impacts at the Earth's surface and persist for millennia. These effects are not necessarily recorded in the geologic (rock) record, but are critical to predicting the consequences of climate and land-use changes at the landscape scale, as well as for management on human/engineering timescales.