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Company History Key People News Customer Profiles Contact Us Employment |
Category: Environmental Sciences Scientist Goes to Great Heights to Turn Up Surprising Data on Air Quality How does the quality of the air above a city affect air quality at ground level? Carl Berkowitz at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is trying to tease out some answers to this tricky but important environmental question. Data Desk and a twin turboprop airplane are key tools in the discovery process. Working with colleagues at PNNL and other institutions, Carl is analyzing the atmosphere above two cities troubled by ground-level ozone and other pollutants, Houston and Phoenix. He is interested in where, when, and how the mixing of gases such as ozone, various oxides of nitrogen and carbon monoxide takes place. When working in Phoenix he used measurements taken by a “heavily instrumented” aircraft to sample the air. As the airplane took off, climbed, and flew repeated sampling missions above the city, it was collecting air chemistry observations at the rate of 1 measurement per second. After a series of these flights, what Carl ends up with is a huge body of data--about 2 million observations per flight, in fact. Carl and other scientists at PNNL are developing a number of mathematical models (typically written in FORTRAN) to explain the mixing of chemically reactive pollutants into turbulent atmospheres at sunrise. He uses the visual exploration capabilities of Data Desk to reveal the chemical and physical issues his models need to account for and to extract a subset of the sampling data with which to test his models. Recently Carl’s explorations into the sampling data revealed very high levels of ozone and related pollutants above Phoenix and Houston early in the morning. “It’s counterintuitive,” Carl says, and this finding may turn some of his models upside down. But he’s hardly dismayed about that. After all, he says philosophically, science isn’t actually about proving hypotheses. “What science is really looking to do is to test and possibly disprove theories, replacing them with ideas that are a little closer to how nature actually works.” And of course, visual exploration of a big stash of data is a sure-fire way to find out if the facts fit the theory. |
Name: Carl Berkowitz Affiliation: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA |
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