As a college undergraduate, my advisor gave me the lofty responsibility of walking up and down the scaffold stairs of an eddy-covariance flux tower. My job was to swap out some data cards and dust cobwebs off the sonic anemometer. Today, I am the technician on nine flux towers across the ecologically diverse New Mexico… More
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Routinely, we have treated land segments as silos and gravitated our perspectives towards fluxes that are directed upward and downward. If you have ever had a leaky sink, one way to fix it would be to put a bucket underneath. But wouldn’t it make more sense to find and fix the core problem that is causing the leak? Nature perhaps is similar to the leaky sink, but on a far more complex scale, and the core problems are often from many different sources and sinks. So, what cause(s) our control volume to leak and unable to conserve energy?
From an operational comfort perspective (science be damned), ideally located flux sites should be placed somewhere easily accessible, near power connection and wireless data coverage, and, preferably, on solid ground. Old Woman Creek has none of the above. Located at the center of a Lake Erie coastal wetland, US-OWC hits all the high notes of… More
The contrast in weather was extreme for 2020 and 2021 at our flux sites located in the semiarid shrublands, grasslands, savannas, and forests of southern Arizona. This was especially true at the Santa Rita Mesquite Savanna site (US-SRM in AmeriFlux vernacular) which had the driest summer monsoon growing season on record in 2020 (42… More
Coastal forested wetlands in the southeastern US provide important ecosystem services, including the conservation of biodiversity, supplying clean, abundant water resources, and the cycling and storage of carbon, which feeds back to stabilize regional climate (Noormets et al., 2010; Sun et al. 2010; Aguilos et al. 2020). However, large areas of these wetlands have been… More
Cities have a complex mix of land uses, from commercial districts with dining and shops to residential neighborhoods linked by travel corridors, as well as industrial areas such as ports and factories. All of these different land uses lead to a diversity of urban sources that emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Direct measurements and analysis of these species over time helps us understand human interactions with climate and air pollution.
I have a love-hate relationship with winter. As manager of the Niwot Ridge US-NR1 AmeriFlux site (Blanken et al., 1998-present), located in a subalpine forest on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, I experience all the seasons. In winter, I love the falling snow and seeing/feeling the powerful wind howling over a frozen landscape,… More
The AmeriFlux FLUXNET data product generated by the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) is now available to download for 21 sites (and counting) via Download Data. The AmeriFlux FLUXNET data product is … Continuous flux / met time series data with Gap-filling Flux partitioning Uncertainty analysis and more! Available in 5 temporal resolutions: half-hourly, daily,… More
Carbon dynamics and greenhouse fluxes in a Florida native rangeland. The Science: Grazing lands, including both rangeland and pastureland, cover about 10.7 Mha in Southeastern United States; have a significant impact on the carbon balance in the region. Native rangelands in Florida extend over 3.1 Mha, and about 1.6 Mha of mostly non-forested areas cover… More
The ‘amerifluxr’ [pronounced: uh-merr-ee-fluhks-arrr] — an R package that allows querying, downloading, and handling AmeriFlux data and metadata — is now released through the CRAN repository. The package was developed by Housen Chu and Koen Huffkens, with support from the AmeriFlux Management Project. The target users include those who intend to use data from many… More