Click the title again to hide.

Volcanoes emit a large variety of gaseous compounds during both episodic eruptions and quiescent continuous degassing activity, from their vents and craters as well as their flanks. Carbon compounds include not only the most abundant of all volcanic gas species, CO₂, but also a multitude of other compounds such as CH₄, CO, hydrocarbons, CFCs, and other heteroatomic compounds including nitriles. This complex carbon chemistry finds applications in several fields of science:

• volcano monitoring (prediction of eruptions based on earliest indicators of unrest)
• origin of life (prebiotic/abiogenic complex carbon chemistry),
• chemosynthesis in extremophiles (food sources based on chemosynthesis),
• natural sources of greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances,
• secondary inorganic and organic aerosol formation,
• development and testing of carbon sequestration leakage monitoring networks.

The technology used to investigate the carbon chemistry of volcanic emissions overlaps with sampling and sensing techniques used in lab and fieldwork in atmospheric chemistry, environmental chemistry and geochemistry, ground- and space-borne remote sensing, and carbon sequestration leakage monitoring.

As part of our current focus at EOS, we have developed for the first time a comprehensive approach to assessing total volcanic carbon budget in real time on a highly active volcano, using a range of partially redundant methods. These include a variety of techniques including remote sensing of vent release of CO₂ and CH₄ using ground- and space-based open-path FTIR measurement, a network of autonomous ground-based real-time continuous sensor stations (based on NDIR, designed in-house), real-time autonomous monitoring in springs and wells, and campaign-based flank carbon flux mapping surveys.

Biography

Florian Schwandner is an analytical geochemist by training. He has international work experience in industry, applied monitoring networks and large campaigns, laboratory and field supervision/management, instrument development, and as a team leader. He has crossed over traditional boundaries between fields several times during his career (including geosciences, analytical chemistry, environmental science, biochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, chemical engineering, natural hazards research, internet cartography, volcanology, IT and databases, occupational health & safety, archaeometry, and history of science).

Florian studied Geology / Earth Sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) at an undergraduate and graduate level, from 1991-1997. During that period he won a competitive scholarship to study as a Graduate Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington from 1995-1996, where he performed research on trace element partitioning under the supervision of M.S. Ghiorso and B.K. Nelson. After his return to Berlin, he graduated with a Diplom degree in 1997 (M.Sc. equivalent) under the supervision of V. Jacobshagen and V.J. Dietrich. Subsequently he joined the Geochemistry Group of Terry Seward at ETH Zürich / IMP, (Switzerland) for his doctoral work on halocarbon emissions from volcanoes, together with Volker Dietrich. This included work on live emissions by volcanoes and expanded the normally 10 to 15 quantitatively measured gas species to well over 100 by including organic compounds. Part of this work was performed at Hall Analytical Ltd., an environmental organic mass spectrometry instrument development and analytical company in Manchester (UK). He graduated with a Dr. sci. nat degree (Ph.D.) from ETH Zürich in Geochemistry and Volcanology in 2002.

Afterwards he held joint postdoctoral appointments at ETH Zürich between the European Union's GEOWARN project, the ETH Institute of Cartography (Natural Hazards group) and the Geochemistry group of Terry Seward. This was followed by a Postdoctoral Research Associate appointment in the research group of Everett Shock and the Keck Environmental Biogeochemistry Laboratory at the Department of Geological Sciences (now SESE) at Arizona State University from 2004-2006, where he worked on trace gas emission mapping and built a new analytical mass spectrometry laboratory. He joined the Atmospheric Chemistry Group of J.L. Collett at Colorado State University in early 2006, changing course away from volcano research and toward quantifying emissions, transport, gas-aerosol transformation, and deposition of atmospheric nitrogen species. He also focused on long-term multiparametric environmental monitoring strategies and methods and gained technical experience in networked, autonomous and telemetered sensing and sampling systems, in collaboration with Air Resource Specialists Inc., The U.S. National Park Service, and Shell Exploration and Production Company.

Since 2007, he has served on the steering committee and as chairman of the technical advisory group of the World Organization of Volcano Observatories (WOVO) Database of Volcanic Unrest (WOVOdat), a global community effort to streamline and harmonize observational data of over 70 observatories in a common database, which is now funded and being implemented at EOS in Singapore. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow with the Volcanology Group of Chris Newhall at the new Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS, Nanyang Technological University) since Fall 2009, where he works on the design, implementation and instrumentation design of comprehensive gas monitoring networks at several Southeast Asian high-risk volcanoes.

Click the title again to hide.

Over the past five decades the United States has implemented a series of air pollution control programs that have led to remarkable progress toward ensuring healthy air quality throughout the country, even in the largest cities that once had truly severe problems. Presently the rate of progress toward achieving the current National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for ozone is slowing, at least by some measures. Nevertheless, there is serious ongoing consideration of lowering the ozone NAAQS still further. Even while U.S. urban air quality has improved, on the broadest spatial scale, the limited available data sets indicate that “background” ozone (i.e. that in the most pristine areas) at northern mid-latitudes increased substantially over the past century, and this increase continues today, at least in some regions. This background represents a substantial fraction of the current ozone NAAQS. This talk will discuss the U.S. approach to air quality improvement and demonstrate its remarkable success, briefly review the reasons for the call for further tightening of the ozone NAAQS, present evidence for the increasing background ozone and examine the difficulties of achieving a tighter NAAQS in the face of this increase. Finally some important gaps in our understanding of observed ozone concentrations and the corresponding research needs that relate to these issues will be identified.

Click the title again to hide.

Seen from space, it is apparent that Earth would more accurately be named Ocean-Cloud – blue and white dominate most images of Earth sent back from space. Ocean and cloud also strongly affect Earth's climate, and yet both are poorly understood. Michigan Tech has been recommended for funding for construction of a multiphase, turbulent reaction chamber which will address uncertainties in cloud and aerosol processes by enabling the study of cloud and aerosol particles in a controlled environment. The purpose of the chamber is to provide an idealization where specific mechanisms can be probed with repeatability, with a focus on aerosol–cloud-particle transformations and the chemical and turbulent processes that influence them.

The chamber will have a working volume of 3.14 m³ (a cylinder of diameter 2 m) and will be able to simulate the full range of tropospherically relevant temperatures and pressures (e.g., ~ -50 to 20°C and 104 to 105 Pa). The chamber will also have the capability to support well characterized turbulence, through Rayleigh-Benard convection. Funds have also been recommended for supporting instrumentation to allow generation and characterization of aerosol and cloud particles, for measurement of thermodynamic and turbulence conditions, and for sampling of particles for subsequent chemical and morphological analysis.

We will provide a brief overview of the chamber's specifications and intended capabilities, then highlight a few of the outstanding issues in atmospheric physics and chemistry that we intend to address. Upon completion, the chamber will be a facility for use by the researchers at Michigan Tech and beyond. There will be ample time for discussion.

Click the title again to hide.

The rigorous evaluation of wildland fire impacts on the biosphere and atmosphere requires methods that can characterize combustion processes across a range of temporal and spatial scales. To overcome several challenges, novel research has been developed to quantify the 1) structure and heterogeneity of the pre-fire vegetation; 2) energy released during the combustion process; and 3) landscape-scale impacts of fire on the biosphere and atmosphere. The grand challenge that this seminar will explore is how to integrate the pre-, active-, and post-fire measurements and physical process models into a single robust and well validated framework.

Click the title again to hide.

Hydrodynamic processes in the Great Lakes directly affect the chemical, biological and ecological dynamics of the system. Horizontal and vertical transport and mixing influence the distribution of nutrients, contaminants, sediments, and biota. Hydrodynamic models can be categorized either as models dealing mainly with water level fluctuations or models of lake circulation and thermal structure. Models of water level fluctuations include storm surge models, models of seiches and normal modes, tidal models, wind wave models, and hydrologic models. The main types of lake circulation and thermal structure models are those dealing only with horizontal motions, and those that incorporate both horizontal motion, vertical motion, and thermal structure, physical (scale) models, particle transport models, and advection-diffusion models. This talk will describe some examples of these models that have made a significant impact on our understanding of physical processes in lakes.

Click the title again to hide.

How can changes in the terrestrial biosphere amplify changes in the climate system? Biogeophysical changes, including changes in forest structure and surface albedo, and biogeochemical changes such as emissions of greenhouse gases, dust and other aerosols, all feed back to climate by changing the radiative budget of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. These feedbacks can operate on rapid timescales that are relevant to human activities, and may be triggered by both natural causes and human activities. While humans have often been assumed to act independently of climate and other environmental constraints, the past half-century of scientific research has led to growing awareness of the close relationship between humanity and their environment from the emergence of modern humans to the Industrial Revolution. The major developments in human society during the since the end of the last Ice Age include agriculture, urbanization, written language, and modern civilization, and such developments were all influenced by environmental conditions. Likewise, human activities may have strongly influenced the climate system itself, possibly even to the point of precluding future Ice Ages. While this point is rather contentious, our research shows that both vegetation and soils have very long memories when it comes to the long history of human interaction with global land cover.

Through the interdisciplinary study of the interaction between soils, vegetation and the atmosphere, the ARVE group at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne is attempting to answer the question of how a dynamic terrestrial biosphere can amplify ongoing climate change. Using innovative new modeling techniques, we are studying how terrestrial nitrogen cycling responds to abrupt climate change events, how long term soil erosion and degradation could have led to widespread, irreversible changes in land cover and ecology, and how the long history of human land use limits the capacity of the terrestrial biosphere to be a carbon sink in the future. This talk will provide an overview of our ongoing research on these and other topics, and provide a basis for discussion on the future of interdisciplinary earth systems science research.

Click the title again to hide.

Abstract not available.

Click the title again to hide.

Regional climate changes are expected to differ significantly from predicted global average changes. Changes in the mean temperatures for summer in the Midwest and Great Lakes regions could be as high as three times the predicted global average changes in temperature. Much smaller and yet significant changes are projected in precipitation. The extremes in temperature and precipitation are also projected to change in this region. One significant impact of these projected changes is could be on agriculture in the Midwest, the granary for the world. Preliminary results from our studies and results from a national effort for developing regional climate projections will be presented. To assess the influence of agriculture on the land surface system and evaluate the impacts of climate change on crop yields, we have integrated agriculture representation for three crop types: maize, soybean, and spring wheat, into the coupled carbon-nitrogen version of the Community Land Model (CLM). We will present results from the CLM-Crop, validated against observations from two ameriflux sites in the U.S., which grow maize and soybean. The need for further studies using high-spatial resolution global models and regional scale climate models will be highlighted.

Click the title again to hide.

In this presentation I will introduce some of the important geological/geophysical issues related to the Galapagos Volcanic center. Recent studies on the tectonic evolution of the Galapagos hot spot and its relationship to the Galapagos spreading ridge suggest it has moved considerably over the last 20 My. In this sense, the Galapagos hot spot is an analogue of the Iceland Hotspot and may provide insights into the evolution of ridge-hotspot interaction. Aseismic ridges resulting from hotspot volcanism cause considerable deformation of oceanic lithosphere prior to subduction. Deformation associated with hot spot traces, such as the Carnegie Ridge, the Emperor Seamounts and the Izu-Bonin arcs may significantly affect volcanism in subduction zones. Illustrations in Kamchatka, Japan and Ecuador will be presented. A new, high resolution, temporary seismic array (SIGNET) was established by Rochester University in 2009 on Isabella Island, targeting Volcano Sierra Negra. The main goal of SIGNET is to investigate seismicity and structure in the caldera and elucidate the nature of trap door faulting characteristic of the eruptions at Sierra Negra. I will explain the ongoing geophysical research, show photographs, and discuss ideas for future research directions on the Islands.

Click the title again to hide.

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope maps and monitors the sky over an extremely broad range in energy. The primary instrument, the Large Area Telescope, observes the entire sky every three hours at energies from ~20 MeV to >300 GeV with much greater sensitivity than previous telescopes operating in this band. The accumulated data from the first year have revealed 1451 unique gamma-ray sources, many previously undetected and many yet to be firmly identified with a known object at other wavelengths. About 30% of the sources vary in brightness and a few are transient, meaning that a singular, highly energetic event produces the gamma rays. I will focus this talk on what the gamma-ray emitters in our own Galaxy are adding to our knowledge about the production of cosmic rays and the end stages of stellar evolution. In particular, I will discuss new types of variable and transient sources found in the LAT all-sky survey.

Click the title again to hide.

Air Quality is strongly affected by local meteorology and localized emission sources. Consequently, air quality tools have been developed to focus on local phenomena. However, air quality is not just a local problem. Observations of chemical tracers that have become available from space-borne sensors over the last decade helped to reveal the large geographical and temporal variability of atmospheric trace species and the strong connections between processes from local to global scales, defined as chemical weather.

In this talk I will discuss efforts in regards to linking the global, regional and local scales by integrating chemical observations from satellite, aircraft and ground with global and regional chemical transport modeling. The focus of the talk will be on the NASA Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites (ARCTAS) field campaign in June 2008 over California. Using observations and modeling tools I will contrast the contributions of the different local emission sources and pollution inflow on surface air quality over California.

Click the title again to hide.

While it has been shown that aerosol size has a direct correlation with its ability to act as an ice nucleus, the role of the composition of freshly emitted and evolving aerosol in nucleation is poorly understood. Here we use combined measurements of ice nucleation and high resolution single particle composition to provide insight on the connection between aerosol composition in ice nucleation. These measurements were collected during the Indirect and Semidirect Aerosols Campaign (ISDAC) over Barrow, AK in the springtime of 2008. In-situ ice nucleation measurements were conducted using the Texas Continuous Flow Diffusion Chamber (CFDC). The composition of ambient particles as well as residuals of cloud droplets and ice crystals were studied on a particle by particle basis using computer controlled scanning electron microscopy (ESEM) with energy dispersive X-ray analysis coupled with near edge X-ray absorption spectroscopy (STXM/NEXAFAS). Observed IN concentrations varied from frequent values of 0.01 per liter to more than 10 per liter, depending on conditions and the availability of ice-nucleating aerosols. Ice crystals residuals collected in a fully glaciated cloud demonstrate that both particle chemistry and size requirements must be met for a particle to be an efficient ice nucleus. According to the STXM/NEXAFAS spectral maps, ice crystals residuals are characterized by insoluble cores of either large brown or black carbon (BBC) or carbonates coated by water soluble organics. In contrast, in samples collected from biomass burning plume, many organic particles were also observed, but these were smaller and did not have insoluble cores. In-situ ice nucleation measurements show that these biomass particles have inferior ice nuclei ability, relative to those collected in the glaciated cloud. Taken together our measurements suggest that two key elements, a critical size (provided by BBC and/or carbonate) and chemical (organic) component are required for an aerosol to be an effective ice nuclei.

Click the title again to hide.

Geo-engineering and earth science investigations landslide slope movement; earthquake-ground deformation; erosion and accretion of soil; and topographic change detection require geodetic metrics of surface deformation. Recent advances in non-invasive surface imaging using laser-based Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) allow for the rapid mapping of complex surfaces. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is advancing the technology and methodology of ground- and airborne-based LIDAR in order to create ultra-high resolution digital terrain models. The power of LIDAR technology for geo-engineering and the geo-sciences is the ability to rapidly capture the extremely high detail of failure morphologies; to analyze them from perspectives and orientations not previously possible; and to permanently archive them for the research community.