During the recent extreme temperature and air quality episode, Róisín was out at Brookhaven airport to help John Mak, from Stony Brook University, with flight prep. John was measuring ozone and NOx and also flew our Picarro CRDS instrument that measures CO2, CH4 and CO. John completed two successful flights each of Saturday and Sunday and analysis of the data is ongoing.
Over all it was a successful, if (heat) exhausting weekend!
Ludda Ludwig has been awarded a Future Investigator in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) fellowship for her work on Hierarchical Scaling of Carbon Fluxes from Terrestrial-Aquatic Interfaces in the Arctic. Congratulations Ludda! We're excited to have Ludda begin her graduate work in September.
Róisín Commane, Emily Follansbee, Chandler Morris, and Charlotte Kwong travelled to Petersham, MA to visit the Harvard Forest research facility in June 2019. Our aim was to make qualitative observations pertaining to studies of trace gas fluxes of CH4, OCS, and O3, to change the setup and gather data from OCS sensors for observing patterns in stomatal conductance.
Congratulations to Margaret Powell for winning the Hoopes Prize for her senior thesis at Harvard College: "Four Years of Alaskan Methane Emissions from the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) Aircraft Campaign". She was nominated by her primary supervisor Prof. Steve Wofsy.
Roisin and Emily visited John Mak's group at Stony Brook University on Long Island on April 30. John gave us a tour of his lab before we visited the New York State Dept of Environmental Conservation air quality measurement site at Flax Pond (you can find the online data here!), which is just to the north of Stony Brook University.
John will be flying around New York City and out over the Long Island sound as part of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) funded and Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM) coordinated …
We're delighted to announce that we were recently funded by New York State Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA) to work on a project lead by Lee Murray, University of Rochester (PI) and Eric M. Leibensperger, SUNY Plattsburgh. We will make continuous measurements of methane at air-quality monitoring sites in New York State. This project aims to constrain regional upwind emissions of methane arriving into New York from neighboring states (hello Pennsylvania and New Jersey :) and examine the downwind impacts of those emissions on…
Maggie Powell joined us at Lamont to lead group meeting this week. She presented her impressive senior thesis work at Harvard College, which focuses on Arctic methane from the NASA CARVE aircraft program. Maggie will be working on a manuscript based on this work over the summer before she leaves for a masters program in Germany in September.
Our NSF funded project to look at how mercury from the atmosphere ends up in forest soils got some media coverage!
Lowell Sun article | Original UMass Lowell Press Release
The project is a collaboration with Prof. Daniel Obrist at UMass Lowell and there is a Postdoctoral Research position available in Daniel's group.
Project Overview and Details
Roisin made her first trip to Albany, NY for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) Energy-Related Air Quality and Health Effects Research Workshop. It was great to hear about all the wonderful monitoring and research going on in New York State and City!
- New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection
- New York State Department of Environmental Conservation
- New York State Energy Research and Development Authority
The final day of the meeting was the Long Island Sound Tropospheric Ozone Study (LISTOS) science team meeting, with a discussion of…
Ludda will be joining the Department of Earth and Environmental Science PhD program in the fall of 2019. Her interests are scaling methane and carbon dioxide emissions, climate change impacts on Arctic carbon cycling through wildfires and permafrost thaw, and coupled biogeochemical cycling at terrestrial-aquatic interfaces. Ludda received her M.Sc. in Biological Sciences from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and B.A. in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Environmental Studies from St. Olaf College
Roisin presented a brown-bag (lunch) meeting on on our plans for urban carbon and air quality at the NYCParks yesterday in a beautiful building! As a thank you they presented her with her name in trees!! And a very cool NYCParks T-shirt!
Roisin wanted to know if this this officially makes her a New Yorker now... Jury is out on that one!
Roisin had a very productive trip to University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA to give a seminar on our Arctic carbon work. There was even some snow falling as Roisin and her host Xi Yang visited their measurement tower.
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.