Art DeGaetano's research focuses on applications of climate data. This work involves the development and dissemination of methods and data sets that provide climatological information to decision-makers in a variety of fields. An example is the development of soil freezing model, based on only the most commonly observed daily meteorological variables (temperature, precipitation and snow depth). This unique models allows the computation of a relatively long record of annual soil freezing maxima at a spatial resolution that that is conducive to creating a national soil freezing extreme map. Such a map is vital to establishing building codes for foundation depths and freeze-sensitive utility burial depth. Observed Climate Variability investigates the interannual variability of such meteorological phenomena as east coast winter storms and extreme temperature occurrence. Such studies look at trends in these data through time as well as casual mechanisms associated with year-to-year variations. Climate Data Quality. The veracity of the climate data archive is important for documenting observed climate variabilty as well as the use of these data by decision-makers. Work in this area involves detecting non-climatic changes in the data record due to changes in observing practices and time-dependent shifts in the environment of the observing site. The development of techniques for data adjustment are also a part of this research area. Climate Impacts Documentation of the impacts of significant climatological (e.g. drought) and weather (e.g. Ice storms) events in the Northeast.
He is director of the Northeast Regional Climate Center, whose mission is to facilitate and enhance the collection, dissemination and use of climate data as well as to monitor and assess climatic conditions and impacts in the twelve-state, northeastern region of the United States.