U of U Grad Student Researches Factors in Order to Understand Climate Change

By Fiona Marcelino

Paul Staten, University of Utah atmospheric sciences graduate student.

Average global temperatures are increasing and 2000-2009 was recorded as the warmest decade worldwide.

Increases in global temperatures have researchers concerned about future climate changes and their effects on the environment.

University of Utah atmospheric sciences graduate student, Paul Staten, is studying large-scale atmospheric circulation change. His interest lies in climate changes over long periods of time and understanding why these changes happen.

Staten’s research proves to be important in understanding the processes of climate change and is critical in estimating vulnerabilities and how future climate change will impact human health, society and the environment.

“We currently have a good picture with CO2, but once you get to smaller scales, that’s what we still have to work out,” said Staten. “We can make projections, but understanding how accurate we are requires better knowledge of climate change factors.”

Staten equates his research to a room of children. One moment the room may be quiet then next, it’s full of noise. His focus is deciphering the cause of the noise be it a specific child, the addition of a new child to the room, or one child’s influence on another.

“There are so many factors involved, and when climate changes, it’s a combination of all these factors and figuring out the combination can be hard. My job is to understand why and what causes specific changes,” said Staten.

Scientists have found that changes in climate have lead to ice sheets melting, a rise in ocean levels and snow melting sooner, which could lead to more extreme weather conditions that could put entire ecosystems in danger.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s research has well established that these changes are happening and will continue to do so. The trick is to understanding what causes these changes.

“It’s important to understand the climate change processes that are responsible for all this. Then, we can look at future projections better and why global warming causes specific changes,” said Staten.

University of Utah Research Could Mean Millions of Dollars to Weather Sensitive Investments

By Javan Rivera

Ryan Oates

When people associate weather patterns with money, they almost always think of crops first.

Farmers and agriculture investors are always hedging their agrarian investments to insure against droughts, floods and more. Weather, fickle as it often is, could mean the difference between a bountiful harvest and healthy economic income, and a dead field with little more than pennies to show for a season’s worth of work.

And while these are all fine examples of the importance weather plays in economic investments, few seem to realize that there is an entire season of economic betting that takes place during the winter months.

Ryan Oates, graduate researcher at the University of Utah, is currently studying atmospheric influences on weather that can have an economic influence during the winter months.

For example, the energy that people use to heat their homes every winter isn’t free. It’s part of a multi-billion dollar industry that, much like the agricultural industry, is greatly subject to global weather patterns. The real question on all these investor’s minds isn’t why the weather changes, but rather, how far out can that weather be forecast, and what else can be done to extend that lead time?

This is one of the most important questions that could be addressed by Oates’ work.

“There’s currently a two to three week lead time between forecasting mid-latitude weather and stratospheric events,” Oates said.

What would happen if that lead time could be extended, with greater understanding of stratospheric patterns during the winter?

Oates, along with his research advisor, Thomas Reichler, are running a series of computer models in the University’s atmospheric sciences department in an attempt to understand the changes of global weather patterns as climate change begins to take affect. More specifically, Oates is studying the effects of CO2 increase on the polar vortex.

The polar vortex is a well-documented massive circulation of the atmosphere in the Northern Hemisphere. The circulation, which takes place in the stratosphere, directly influences winter weather in the mid-latitudes according to Oates, meaning the importance of what happens in the vortex can’t be understated for energy investors.

Oates said that due to the direct correlation between the polar vortex and global weather patterns, the vortex can not only affect tropospheric weather, but tropospheric weather can affect it as well. Any time large-scale tropospheric weather destabilizes the vortex, it can stop spinning, or even reverse as part of an event known as “Stratospheric Sudden Warming” (SSW). These SSW events can significantly change weather patterns in the mid-latitudes.

“The troposphere affects the polar vortex, but it also works the other way,” Oates said. “So when you have these sudden warming events, that impacts storm tracks. When you have a sudden warming event, that tends to push those storms farther south towards the mid-latitudes.”

Oates uses a global climate model in order to simulate advanced states of global climates containing large-scale CO2 increase in order to observe what effects that has on the polar vortex.

“Since CO2 is expected to readily increase throughout this century, what would happen to our global climate model if we doubled CO2 in it?” Oates said.

The preliminary results, according to Oates, are that an increase in greenhouse gases means an increase in SSW events.

“This means that our winters will be more variable,” Oates said. “That’s obviously important, because you will potentially have more instances where you have periods of above and below average weather.”

What does this mean for investors in energy supplies? Oates said, this research could be a significant driving force behind the “opportunity and risk” these investors face going forward.

As global climate change marches on, the significance of SSW events is likely to only increase for these investors.

This correlation between his work and real world economic consequences is something that drives Oates.

“For me, science ties into everyday things,” Oates said. “You can’t isolate it to just one thing. It always has real life implications.”

With his graduate studies coming to an end, Oates expects to graduate with a master’s degree this fall, and hopes to apply his research to the real life consequences he finds so fascinating.

“Ideally, I’d like to work with a company that deals with weather sensitive commodities,” Oates said.

In the end, regardless of where Oates ends up, his research represents a step forward in understanding and forecasting storm and weather patterns across the globe.

Heat, Livers and Herbivores: Climate change and wildlife

By Fiona Marcelino

Kurnath shows off the biology lab’s pet woodrat, Charlie.

Increasing global temperatures have the potential to alter ecosystems and the resources they provide one another.

It is estimated that 20 to 30 percent of plant and animal species will be at increased extinction if global temperature rises more than 3.6-5.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Due to changing climate conditions, University of Utah graduate student, Patrice Kurnath, is examining the physiology of woodrats as a potential predictor of how other herbivorous mammals may react to climate change. 

“I’m investigating the relationship between ambient temperature, plant toxins and liver functions through a sacrifice free assay,” said Kurnath. “I’m interested in looking at how environmental changes affect the woodrat’s ability to metabolize plant toxins.”

Kurnath’s studies in analyzing the relationship between the woodrats’ ability to digest and metabolize plant toxins and also studying how both plants and animals adapt to environmental changes could potentially be applied to mammals and herbivores in different ecosystems as a predictor of how they might respond to climate change.

“Woodrats are great species to study because they’re not endangered and they lend themselves to numerous ecological and evolutionary questions,” said Kurnath. “They also live in the desert which is usually predicted to be affected first and most severely in climate change.”

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, rising global temperatures can affect the natural world and raise questions of how vulnerable populations will adapt to direct and indirect affects associated with climate change. Higher temperatures require higher energy expenditures, which means more energy is used to obtain food. This means that any change in temperature can cause stress and negatively affect an animal’s metabolic rate.

Findings from Scientific American connect the increase of global temperatures to increased metabolic rates in various animals. While higher metabolic rates in humans is not necessarily troubling, researches are worried about how it might affect future species, especially those living in areas where food and water are limited.

“Plants, trees and other environmental elements have been and are going to continue to change because of increasing global temperatures,” said Kurnath. “By studying the physiology of these woodrats, we can also speculate how other mammals and herbivores not living in the dessert may be affected by climate change.”

Kurnath studies the physiology of Neotoma bryanti, also known as Bryant’s woodrat.

Charlie’s cage in the biology lab.

Carbon dioxide model could aid in reducing Utah pollution

By Javan Rivera

Salt Lake City, Utah is facing a very serious problem concerning air pollution.

It’s no secret that Utah winters often cause severe inversions that trap large amounts of dirty air in the Salt Lake Valley. However, what’s less widely known is the cause of the problem and what exactly is being done to rectify the situation.

Enter Carolyn Stwertka, a graduate research assistant at the University of Utah who, along with her advisor, are currently developing a model for measuring carbon dioxide movement in the Salt Lake Valley.

Stwertka’s work, which is funded by a GK-12 National Science Foundation grant http://www.gk12.org/ called Think Globally, Learn Locally http://tgll.utah.edu/home.html, is vital to understanding exactly how carbon dioxide circulates through the greater Salt Lake City area and how exactly carbon dioxide emissions can be accurately measured for future Utah policy and legislation.

According to Stwertka, the main cause of Utah’s inversion problem is that the Salt Lake Valley acts as a natural bowl for collecting dirty air. With the Oquirrh and Wasatch mountain ranges hedging in the valley’s south and east sides, the Great Salt Lake trapping air from the west, and the high elevation of the valley’s north end, very little air is able to escape the valley without the aid of significant weather changes such as storms.

“Studying carbon dioxide in an urban environment is of interest to a lot of people because humans are creating a new ‘urban environment’ and this [modeling] provides a way to verify if emissions are decreasing due to [potential future] policy change,” she said.

Salt Lake City provides a very unique testing ground for this research not only because of its natural, inversion-causing barriers, but also because it is home to “the longest standing, consistently running set of [carbon dioxide measuring] stations in a city in the world,” said Stwertka.

The set of stations, mostly owned and operated by University of Utah professor Jim Ehleringer, is the primary source from which Stwertka drew her carbon dioxide measurements of Salt Lake City’s surface layer of air for her case study of the winter of 2010-2011.

Using carbon dioxide measurements along with a set of data points that account for wind forces, biogenic flux as a result of plant life in the valley, man-made emissions, and entrainment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrainment_%28meteorology%29, are all input into Stwertka’s model in an attempt to accurately measure carbon dioxide movement through the valley.

“We have our model data and we can see how well it compares to the carbon dioxide observations around the valley [as measured by Ehleringer’s stations],” Stwertka said.

The real core of Stwertka’s work comes into play when it comes to finding an accurate measurement of not only how carbon dioxide circulates through the valley, but more importantly how those emissions eventually make their way out of the city air, and into the higher parts of the troposphere. Ultimately, what effect that has on the global mean of greenhouse gases.

Based on her observations from her own unpublished research, she’s discovered that in urban environments such as Salt Lake City, carbon dioxide tends to form a concentrated dome over the city similar to the “urban heat island effect.”

“In cities you produce a lot of carbon dioxide because it is concentrated,” Stwertka explained. “This essentially means that cities create a lot of carbon dioxide that stays isolated around the city and doesn’t extend into the surrounding rural environment. The question is, how do you relate the surface measurements to the global mean average?”

If Stwertka’s model can successfully measure carbon dioxide emission dispersal into the greater atmosphere, her model could be vital to creating future Utah policy changes regarding carbon dioxide emission regulation.

Salt Lake City is currently in violation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards, thanks in part, to the valley’s severe inversion problem. With Salt Lake City currently attempting to create a State Implementation Plan (SIP), in order to regulate emissions, Stwertka’s work presents an opportunity to gain accurate carbon dioxide dissemination measurements for the plan.

Not only does Stwertka’s model hold promise for measuring carbon dioxide levels, but it also holds the possibility of measuring additional air pollutants such as PM 2.5 and PM 10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particulates.

“Understanding the broad pattern [of carbon dioxide emissions] can help you understand the traveling of other pollutants,” Stwertka said. “We would like to further develop the model to track other pollutants as well so that our model can be used for the SIP.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3dxx_RNsbLs

An inversion creeps across the city as Carolyn Stwertka hikes up the Grandeur Trail to gather carbon dioxide density measurements of Salt Lake City’s surface air.

Throughout the hike, the inversion managed to spread all the way to the base of Grandeur Peak, and even enveloped part of the mountain.

Carolyn Stwertka hiked ¾ of the way up the Grandeur Trail during the winter of 2010, carrying a backpack full of electronic equipment designed to take measurements of carbon dioxide emissions throughout the trek.