Environmental and Climate research at Brookhaven National Lab is focused on aerosol chemistry and microphysics, aerosol related infrastructure, climate and process modeling, cloud processes, data management and software engineering, terrestrial ecosystems, meteorological services, and tracer technologies.
Aerosol Chemistry & Microphysics
Focused on improving process-level understanding of aerosol formation and evolution mechanisms, aerosol absorption, and the direct and indirect influences that aerosols have on clouds, precipitation and climate.
Aerosol Related Infrastructure
Provides measurement capabilities to the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program for long-term measurements of aerosols and their precursors across a global network of ground- and aircraft-based locations.
Climate and Process Modeling
Uses multi-scale process modeling and observational analyses to understand the processes essential to clouds, precipitation, land-atmosphere interactions, and urban impacts.
Cloud Processes
Seeks to improve understanding of microphysical and dynamical processes that impact the lifecycle of clouds to improve their representation in climate models.
Technology Development & Applications and Meteorological Services
Responsible for the maintenance, calibration, data collection and data archiving for the weather instrumentation network associated with BNL's atmospheric dispersion concerns.
Terrestrial Ecosystem Science & Technology
Seeks to improve the representation of ecosystem processes in Earth System Models in order to increase our ability to understand and project global change.
Tracer Technologies
The Tracer Technology Group uses perfluorocarbon tracers as a tool for understanding the processes that transport air, heat, water, and pollutants.
Funding Agencies
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MAY
9
Thursday
Environmental & Climate Sciences Department Seminar
"High-throughput field phenotyping of photosynthetic capacity using hyperspectral imaging"
Presented by Katherine Meacham, Univ. of Illinois
11 am, Large Conference Room, Bldg. 490
Thursday, May 9, 2019, 11:00 am
Hosted by: Angie Burnett
Improved photosynthetic rates have been shown to increase crop biomass, making improved photosynthesis a focus for driving future grain yield increases. Improving the photosynthetic pathway offers opportunity to meet food demand, but requires high throughput measurement techniques to detect photosynthetic variation in natural accessions and transgenically improved plants. Gas exchange measurements are the most widely used method of measuring photosynthesis in field trials but this process is laborious and slow, and requires further modeling to estimate meaningful parameters and to upscale to the plot or canopy level. In field trials of tobacco with modifications made to the photosynthetic pathway, we infer key photosynthetic parameters from imaging spectroscopy using a partial least squares regression technique. We used two hyperspectral cameras with resolution 2.1nm in the visible range and 4.9nm in the NIR. Ground-truth measurements from leaf-level photosynthetic gas exchange, full-range (400-2500nm) hyperspectral reflectance and extracted pigments support the model. The results from a range of wild-type cultivars and from genetically modified germplasm offer a high-throughput screening tool for crop trials aimed at identifying increased photosynthetic capacity.
The Environmental & Climate Sciences Department is part of the Environment, Biology, Nuclear Science & Nonproliferation Directorate at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
