Climate change and variability can strongly control the
population dynamics of disease vectors such as mosquitoes,
altering their location and seasonality and possibly increasing
the risk of disease transmission to humans. This project
develops and implements a climate-based Dynamic Mosquito
Simulation Model to understand and project climate effects on
mosquito population dynamics, developing results that will help
climate-health scientists and public health decision makers
better understand and project the role of climate in actual
disease cases. This project utilizes dynamic modeling (Morin and
Comrie 2010) which relies on first principle processes to
simulate mosquito population dynamics at the daily level as
driven by climate and land cover inputs. Mosquito trapping is
used to validate model and characterize mosquito habitats in
Tucson. Also, interviews with public health officials are being
used to understand how they conceptualize climate and disease in
their health districts and the use of dynamic mode