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…
Roisin is Primary Investigator (PI) on a recently selected NOAA proposal focussing on "Quantifying the impact of biogenic and anthropogenic fluxes on the atmospheric composition of the New York City Metro Area" with John Mak at Stony Brook University and Andrew Reinmann, City University of New York. Our New York centric project will be further developing our CO2 measurement network and will be completing a series of summer intensives over the next few summers.
We are delighted to have Garima join us for this project. And Andrew Reinmann at CUNY is currently looking for a graduate…
With the continued work from home orders our research this summer mostly continues online. Róisín is still in New York City but the rest of the group are spread throughout the country. Luke and Bronte are in MA, Ludda is in RI and Charlotte is in CA. Unfortunately the project Zeyi is working on has been suspended until we can get back in the lab again. While it's not the same as seeing each other in person, we are embracing online group meetings with added pets.
Our newest group member Savannah is joining as part of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory REU program…
Róisín spoke with Matt McGrath from the BBC again about carbon emissions in NYC in his article titled: Climate Change and Coronavirus. With everything shutdown in NYC, CO2 emissions were notably reduced but 80-90% of NYC's emissions remain. She thinks it's a good example of why personal behavior alone is not the solution to climate change.
Our urban work was featured in a blog post by Elise Gout on the Earth Institute's State of the Planet: Project Takes A New Approach to Gauging New York City’s Emissions
Both Róisín and Luke were mentioned. Thanks to Ricardo Toledo-Crow from the Next Generation Environmental Sensor Lab, Environmental Sciences Initiative, Advanced Science Research Center, CUNY for some great photos for the article!
The COVID-19 shutdown of New York City in March 2020 has improved the air quality and changed how much carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane we see in the atmosphere at the CUNY ASRC observatory in Harlem. Róisín spoke with a number of media outlets about what that means for carbon and air quality in NYC.
Although Róisín will never listen to it, her presentation at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in January 2020 is now available online: Commane, Schiferl, et al., Assessing the Impact of African Emissions on tropical atmospheric composition, 2020
At the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting in December 2020 Ludda Ludwig gave a talk on her work on using machine learning models to predict dissolved methane and carbon dioxide concentrations in water bodies in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in Alaska. Carbon dioxide concentrations were tightly coupled to dissolved oxygen and increased in lakes with more complex shapes. Methane concentrations increased as a function of both dissolved carbon availability and lability. Using remote sensing data of watershed land cover and lake shape and size, dissolved methane and carbon dioxide can be scaled to…
Ludda Ludwig and Roisin Commane were coauthors on a publication in Nature Climate Change released in October 2019 titled “Large loss of CO2 in winter observed across the northern permafrost region.” This study was a large collaboration from the Permafrost Carbon Network that synthesized more than 1,000 on-the-ground observations of monthly CO2 emissions. These data are particularly difficult to collect in arctic winters. The cold and darkness can prevent the operation and powering of instrumentation, and the remote locations make it difficult to install and maintain flux systems.…
Róisín attended the 2nd international workshop on carbonyl sulfide (OCS) in Obergurgl, Austria, hosted by University of Innsbruck. The attendees were mainly from Europe with four American attendees. It was an informative and cross disciplinary workshop. Roisin presented an overview of airborne OCS observations and recent work at Harvard Forest.
Ludda Ludwig presented the first work from her NASA FINESST fellowship at the NASA Terrestrial Ecology meeting at University of Maryland this week! Congrats on a great lightning talk and poster presentation Ludda!
Róisín was very excited to be quoted in National Geographic! Craig Welch has written a feature "The Arctic is thawing fast. That affects us all" for the September 2019 edition of National Geographic. The piece has some amazing photos by Kate Orlinsky and a little input from Róisín.
Our summer high school engineering students Barakat, Miguel, Durrel and Brianna presented their work this week in a poster entitled: "Building a cost effective device to measure CO2 in NYC". They worked with (the wonderful) Nick Frearson on coding the arduino controllers, practiced their soldering skills and made mobile measurements of CO2 between Lamont and various parts of NYC. They analyzed the data in R and made a really great poster for the end of the summer.
Well done to everyone for a successful project!
Charlotte Kwong presented her summer project work to the LDEO community through a short oral presentation and a longer poster session. Her poster was entitled: Extending the tropospheric ozone flux record for a hardwood forest and focused on the long-term ozone flux record at Harvard Forest. Well done Charlotte!
Charlotte will continue her research as part of her senior thesis in the Dept of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University.
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…
Roisin is Primary Investigator (PI) on a recently selected NOAA proposal focussing on "Quantifying the impact of biogenic and anthropogenic fluxes on the atmospheric composition of the New York City Metro Area" with John Mak at Stony Brook University and Andrew Reinmann, City University of New York. Our New York centric project will be further developing our CO2 measurement network and will be completing a series of summer intensives over the next few summers.
We are delighted to have Garima join us for this project. And Andrew Reinmann at CUNY is currently looking for a graduate…