We had our first visit to New York Botanical Garden, where we will be working across the summer as part of our NOAA funded project on urban biogenic carbon.
Ludda's paper on Predicting Inland Aquatic CO2 and CH4 concentrations and the Effects of Wildfires in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska using Machine Learning techniques was published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles. This is part of Ludda's NASA FINESST fellowship research in collaboration with our wonderful colleagues at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Congrats Ludda!
Sarah M. Ludwig, Susan M. Natali, Paul J. Mann, John D. Schade, Robert M. Holmes, Margaret Powell, Greg Fiske, Roisin Commane, Using Machine Learning to Predict Inland Aquatic CO2 and CH4 concentrations and the Effects…
Róisín and Andrew met with colleagues Delphine Farmer (CSU) and Dylan Millet (University of Minnesota) at the tall tower in Mineola, NY. Dylan and Delphine will be using the site for their NOAA AEROMMA project in summer 2023! The tower has also hosted a Picarro G2301, operated by Earth Networks Inc, to measure CO2 and methane concentrations for many years. We've used that data in the past so it was great to see the instrument and tower in person!
Over the past few months we have had new members join the group and others moved on to new positions.
Dandan Wei joined as a postdoc on our Urban Carbon project with Andy Reinmann and John Mak funded by NOAA. Andrew Hallward-Driemeier joined as a research assistant on the Methane in NYS project with Lee Murray from Rochester funded by NYSERDA. Jamie and Garima moved on to other positions and projects over the past year.
We finally had an all in person group meeting this week with everyone there, but Roisin forgot to take a photo to mark the occasion... Oops.
Roisin and Luke's paper discussing the air quality impacts of climate mitigation policies in cities has been published in the journal Chem. It was also highlighted in their paper publication on Earth Day!
Commane, R., and Schiferl, L., D. Climate mitigation policies for cities must consider air quality impacts. Chem, 14, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.2022.02.006, 2022.
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!
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 are delighted that Yuwei Zhao joined the group in Sept 2022 as a first year graduate student in the Columbia University Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences. She will be working on urban air quality and composition.
Our fieldwork in New York is continuing through the summer for various projects, even with some unavoidable COVID delays for the mobile lab deployment.
Dandan and Andrew are leading our summer fieldwork around the city and at the Bronx Botanical Garden and LDEO. Christine and Rebecca have joined the group as part of the LDEO Summer Research Education program and are focussing on methane from wetlands and aquatic systems in the NYC area. Felicity is joining us from Hunter College and Andy Reinmann's group and is focussing on isoprene emissions from urban vegetation. Ludda is still…
It may have taken two years but Bronte Dalton and Charlotte Kwong finally got a graduation ceremony! They were both doing senior theses in our group in spring 2020 when the pandemic shut everything down. It was great to see them back and to learn how their science careers have progressed!
Róisín, Luke and Ludda travelled to the NASA ABoVE Science Team meeting in Fairbanks, AK to present their work on arctic carbon. Ludda presented the work so far on her NASA FINESST fellowship. Luke presented his work synthesizing the methane models and observations from across the NASA ABoVE program.
Roisin and Luke joined a tour of the Permafrost Tunnel in Fox, AK. The masks were quite helpful to reduce the smell! Thawing permafrost and active microbes are quite a pungent combination.
Róisín and Andrew traveled to the NYS DEC air quality site in Pinnacles State Park near Addison, New York. It was a long day out but we met with our collaborator Prof. Lee Murray and graduate student Matt Lomen from University of Rochester. We returned Lee's instrumentation that we were comparing against our instrumentation and retrieved the instrument we had given him on loan.
We had our first visit to New York Botanical Garden, where we will be working across the summer as part of our NOAA funded project on urban biogenic carbon.
Ludda's paper on Predicting Inland Aquatic CO2 and CH4 concentrations and the Effects of Wildfires in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska using Machine Learning techniques was published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles. This is part of Ludda's NASA FINESST fellowship research in collaboration with our wonderful colleagues at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Congrats Ludda!
Sarah M. Ludwig, Susan M. Natali, Paul J. Mann, John D. Schade, Robert M. Holmes, Margaret Powell, Greg Fiske, Roisin Commane, Using Machine Learning to Predict Inland Aquatic CO2 and CH4 concentrations and the Effects…
Róisín and Andrew met with colleagues Delphine Farmer (CSU) and Dylan Millet (University of Minnesota) at the tall tower in Mineola, NY. Dylan and Delphine will be using the site for their NOAA AEROMMA project in summer 2023! The tower has also hosted a Picarro G2301, operated by Earth Networks Inc, to measure CO2 and methane concentrations for many years. We've used that data in the past so it was great to see the instrument and tower in person!
Over the past few months we have had new members join the group and others moved on to new positions.
Dandan Wei joined as a postdoc on our Urban Carbon project with Andy Reinmann and John Mak funded by NOAA. Andrew Hallward-Driemeier joined as a research assistant on the Methane in NYS project with Lee Murray from Rochester funded by NYSERDA. Jamie and Garima moved on to other positions and projects over the past year.
We finally had an all in person group meeting this week with everyone there, but Roisin forgot to take a photo to mark the occasion... Oops.
Roisin and Luke's paper discussing the air quality impacts of climate mitigation policies in cities has been published in the journal Chem. It was also highlighted in their paper publication on Earth Day!
Commane, R., and Schiferl, L., D. Climate mitigation policies for cities must consider air quality impacts. Chem, 14, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.2022.02.006, 2022.
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.