If you are senior graduate student or postdoc interested in joining our group, please consider applying to
- Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Postdoctoral Fellowships
- NSF Atmospheric Science Postdoctoral Research Fellowships
Or contact Róisín with an overview of your research interests to discuss proposal ideas. There are no open positions in the group at the moment.
Research Overview
We investigate surface - atmosphere fluxes of greenhouse gases and air pollutants using field measurements, atmospheric trace gas observations and various modeling tools and the ecosystem processes driving these fluxes. Our urban work is hosted on the New York Atmospheric composition and Air Quality (NYAAQ) website. We focus on carbon (CO2 and methane) fluxes for our Arctic tundra and Boreal ecosystems. Our global approach to quantifying carbon fluxes is explained in the CarbonFOX project and more recently through collaborations with the MethaneSAT mission.
Recent News
Róisín and Luke contributed to Maria Tzortiou's paper in ACP describing the NO2 changes around New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tzortziou, M., Kwong, C. F., Goldberg, D., Schiferl, L., Commane, R., Abuhassan, N., Szykman, J. J., and Valin, L. C.: Declines and peaks in NO2 pollution during the multiple waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in the New York metropolitan area, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 22, 2399–2417, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-2399-2022, 2022.
Our paper on nitrous oxide observations during ATom is out in ACP! Yenny Gonzalez Ramos lead the paper with contributions from Luke Schiferl and Róisín Commane as corresponding author. Yenny is now a researcher at the Izana Atmospheric Research Observatory in Tenerife and she wrote a great summary of the paper in English and Spanish!
Publication: Previously unaccounted atmospheric mercury deposition in a midlatitude deciduous forest
Our paper with Daniel Obrist is out in PNAS! Congrats to co-authors Jamie Harrison and Charlotte Kwong!
Link to the paper is available here
QCLS analyzer deployed at Howland Forest to measure CO2 and OCS gradients above and within the canopy. We also added a soil chamber to our measurements at this site to examine soil fluxes. This work made possible in collaboration with Mary Whelan at Rutgers University
We have all made it through another pandemic spring and surprisingly it looks like all our fieldwork will be going ahead in summer 2021 (with COVID adaptations of course)!
Róisín gave an invited talk at the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting which was held online instead of New Orleans in January 2021. Her talk was focussed on "Characterizing air masses in the remote atmosphere using in situ airborne observations: Nitrous Oxide - N2O" and highlights the nitrous oxide observations from the NASA ATom missions. A paper by Yenny Gonzalez Ramos will be submitted soon.
Big shout out to all the NASA ATom Science Team for making this possible.
Group interactions have been difficult during the pandemic. Our group is spread across the country with people in New York, Boston and California and nearly half the group have never even visited Lamont or Columbia.
So to try and bring a little Holiday cheer we met on zoom for a gift exchange. It was awkward but fun and I am very thankful to the whole group for trying to make the best of a weird situation. Hopefully we can go our in person next December to celebrate making it through the whole thing!
Happy holidays to everyone and their pets!
Six members of the Commane group are presenting at AGU (some with multiple presentations!). We were in panic-mode trying to get everything done on time but we made it just in time! Check out the following list of group members and their presentations. Links will be added when available.
I just ended my first field season with the Commane group! I used an Aeris instrument to measure soil fluxes of carbonyl sulfide (OCS) at Harvard Forest. The goal of the project is to constrain soil OCS fluxes during fall senescence, a large uncertainty in current models that use OCS as a proxy for gross primary productivity. We suspect that OCS uptake by soils continues after fall senescence, when photosynthesis is largely assumed to be negligible and soil respiration continues. The results from this project will help us understand the decoupling of OCS and CO2 fluxes in fall to better constrain…
We were recently awarded an NSF Arctic Observing Network grant focusing on "Bridging the scale gap between local and regional methane and carbon dioxide isotopic fluxes in the Arctic" with David Sayres, Jim Anderson and Steve Wofsy at Harvard University. As David, Jim and Steve fly around at low altitude over the North Slope of Alaska, Luke Schiferl and Ludda Ludwig are excited to dive into the interpretation of the aircraft data.
A lot of papers from the ATom project were published over the spring/summer and more are in review.
Some of these papers are included below. Now just to find the time to write up our own work (in progress!).
- Bourgeois et al: Global-scale distribution of ozone in the remote troposphere from the ATom and HIPPO airborne field missions
- Martinez-Alonso: 1.5 years of TROPOMI CO measurements: comparisons to MOPITT and ATom
- Wang: Global Atmospheric Budget of Acetone: Air‐Sea Exchange and the Contribution to Hydroxyl Radicals
- Travis: Constraining remote oxidation capacity…
