The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With the SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability.
This project focuses on developing a low-cost, mobile network capable of mapping CO2 greenhouse gas concentrations in urban environments with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. The work would culminate in the deployment of a small-scale prototype network on the fleet of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) shuttle buses. The SEES Fellow would integrate the collected data with an atmospheric model and ancillary meteorology, satellite, and traffic measurements to produce high spatial and temporal resolution surface carbon emissions maps in the vicinity of the UC Berkeley and LBNL campuses. This research project would lay the groundwork for deploying a future metropolitan-scale network which could then serve as a much needed policy tool for understanding and reducing emissions from traffic sources in urban areas, and thereby promoting global sustainability.
Current inventories of greenhouse gas emissions are based on self-reported data, are subject to large uncertainties, and have historically been systematically under-reported. Moveover, regional governments are increasingly making commitments to greenhouse gas emission reductions, but presently there is no means of verifying whether the proposed policy changes have the intended effect. This research program promises to provide an independent method for constructing emissions inventories, based on direct atmospheric sampling. The proposed method would further provide higher spatial and temporal resolution inventories than have previously been achieved by any method. Strong national policy and international agreements are urgently needed to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Trust-but-verify is a necessary component for future treaties regulating greenhouse gases. This project establishes a scalable approach that can be used to provide empirical verification of CO2 emissions.
In addition, this SEES Fellowship broadens the Fellow's academic expertise beyond her disciplinary training in physics to include new skills in systems engineering, traffic emissions modeling, analytic chemistry, atmospheric transport, and the tools of data science, including the statistical method of data assimilation for atmospheric data. Regular interaction with regional government organizations will enhance her understanding of the political decision-making process and its relationship to policy-relevant scientific measurements. Dr. Tom Kirschstetter (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) and Professor Inez Fung (University of California, Berkeley) serve as the Felow's principal mentors in this endeavor.
