The cycling of carbon dioxide through our Earth systems is a fascinating and intricate dance that takes place among the atmosphere, plants, soils, minerals, fresh water, ice, oceans, people and industry. Carbon is a fundamental building block of life and our primary source of energy. Studying the carbon cycle spans many of the disciplines in Earth and Mineral Science as well as other fields.

Our research group, headed by Dr. Ken Davis in the Department of Meteorology, observes and models the flow of carbon dioxide across soil, vegetation and the atmosphere at local to global scales using a variety of observational platforms such as field-based ecology measurements, meteorological towers and buoys, instrumented aircraft and earth observing satellites. Shown here are several instruments used to measure the flux of carbon dioxide at an old-growth maple (Acer spp.) and eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) forest near the Sylvania Wilderness, Ottawa National Forest, Watersmeet, MI. We are measuring carbon dioxide flux here and at several other towers across northern Wisconsin as part of a regional carbon dioxide study, the Chequamegon-Ecosystem Atmosphere Study (ChEAS: http://cheas.psu.edu). This tower, funded by the Department of Energy, is one of 250+ carbon dioxide flux towers across the world that have gone up since the early 1990s to improve our understanding of the terrestrial carbon cycle. This site was installed in late 2001 by Ankur Desai, a Ph.D. candidate in Meteorology, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Minnesota.

The instruments are mounted on top of a 37 m (120 ft) aluminum tower. The claw-like instruments are sonic anemometers which sends ultrasonic pulses of sound to measure high frequency 3-dimensional wind speeds. The red funnel connects to an infrared gas analyzer to measure high-frequency variations in the carbon dioxide signal. Together, these instruments can be used with theories of atmospheric turbulence to measure stand-scale carbon dioxide exchange. The instrument near the top anemometer is another kind of infrared gas analyzer that Kelly Cherrey, a Ph.D. student in the Meteorology Department, added in late May 2005 for system intercomparison. Ankur Desai uses the observations from this tower and the rest of the ChEAS network in his Ph.D. dissertation on synthesis scaling of regional carbon dioxide flux. He also enjoys climbing towers.

Last Updated: November 22, 2005

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