News

Dandan Wei's ES&T paper: High-Resolution Modeling of Summertime Biogenic Isoprene Emissions in New York City received a lot of interest from NYC news! Kevin Krajick at LDEO wrote a press release that interested many media outlets, some of which wasn't quite what we intended. But thankfully, Austyn Gaffney interviewed Dandan, Andrew Reinmann and Roisin for a really well written article in the New York Times: New York City's Trees Work Hard. Still, they could use a little help that explained the link between biogenic volatile organic compounds and air quality in New York City.

Thanks again to the NOAA AC4 program for funding this project! 

A new peer-reviewed article evaluates a first-of-its-kind pilot project to study the effects of residential cooking electrification (gas-to-induction) in a public housing setting in the U.S. Results suggest  the effectiveness of electric stoves as a means to reduce nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) exposure in the home with households that replaced their gas stove for an induction stove registering a 56% drop in NO₂ concentrations compared to households that still had gas stoves. Participants also unanimously reported satisfaction with their induction stoves and cited significant quality of life improvements following the transition.

Yuwei attended the 2024 Summer School for Inverse Modeling of Greenhouse Gases, Fort Collins, CO, June 2024

The group attended three workshops in Boulder, CO over the space of two weeks in May to present on our Arctic and urban work. 

Congratulations to Dr Ludda Ludwig on brilliantly defending her PhD dissertation. Ludda was an amazing student to work with over the last 4.5 years! While we are sorry to lose her, we are delighted that she has taken a position at the US EPA to focus on methane. Best wishes for the future Dr. Ludwig!! 

Roisin gave the April Public Lecture at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory:

Clearing the Air: Understanding New York City's Air Quality and Climate 

Thanks to all who joined in person. The lecture was recorded and is available on Lamont's YouTube channel alongside all the previous Lectures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtMcAQVOvUk

Many of the group presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall meeting in San Francisco, CA in December 2023. 

Ludda had her second paper published (Ludwig et al., 2023) and she has submitted her third paper to Biogeosciences Discussion. 

She is now working on her fourth paper and we're all excited to see those results. Congrats Ludda! 

In October 2023, Roisin was a guest presenter and panelist at the Innovations in Instrumentation for Observations of Methane Emissions in the Arctic online meeting. This was a joint meeting between the Technology Innovation and Application Collaboration Team and the Permafrost Community of Practice of the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC).

We traveled to Brookhaven National Laboratory for a day of tests on a boiler there. Preliminary results were exciting; stay tuned for more updates!

We are delighted that recent research assistant Andrew Hallward-Driemeier has joined the graduate program in the Columbia University Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences and will continue in the group as a graduate student. With his experience running the long-term CO2 and CH4 observation sites around NYC, Andrew will be investigating some of the interesting processes we have seen in the urban area, including the impacts of incomplete combustion. 

We joined in the NOAA funded project Fluxes of Reactive Organic Gases in New York (FROG-NY) to measure greenhouse gases at at tower in Mineola, NY during summer 2023. We measured CO₂, CO, methane, ethane and N₂O at two different heights. Our analysis of this data is being lead by graduate student Yuwei Zhao, with field assistance from Andrew Hallward-Driemeier and Roisin Commane and funding from NYSERDA. We are going back for a winter intensive in Jan/Feb 2024 with FROGSICLE. This heating season intensive will be very interesting for the greenhouse gases but we don't expect to see much from the biosphere. 

The FROG-NY PIs Delphine Farmer (Colorado State University) and Dylan Millet (University of Minnesota) and their whole team have been awesome to work with! 

Roisin is PI on the CarbonFOX satellite proposal to the NASA Earth System Explorer (ESE). After many years of work, and a particularly intense few weeks in July, she was delighted that the proposal was finally submitted!  

Roisin and Andrew were featured in a PBS NOVA program Chasing Carbon Zero.

Ludda Ludwig received 2nd place in the student awards at the AMS Hydrology Conference in Denver in January 2023. Congratulations Ludda! 

She also gave a fantastic oral presentation at the AGU Fall Meeting in Chicago in December. Ludda is on a roll!