Tech & Science
Technology and Science news from Boulder, Colorado
NOAA extends CU climate studies partnership for 5-10 years
Aug 30th
continue joint leadership of CIRES
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has selected the University of Colorado Boulder to continue a federal/academic partnership that extends NOAA’s ability to study climate change, improve weather models and better predict how solar storms can disrupt communication and navigation technologies.
The selection means that NOAA will continue funding the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, for at least five years and up to 10 more years. CIRES was established at CU-Boulder in 1967.
The amount of the award is contingent on the availability of funding in the federal budget, but NOAA anticipates that up to $32 million may be available annually. Total NOAA funding is variable from year to year and is based on the number of projects the university proposes and NOAA approves.
Following a competitive process, NOAA selected CU-Boulder to administer the CIRES partnership which leverages university resources to expand understanding of the “Earth system” — the interrelationships among the atmosphere, oceans, land, living things and the sun’s energy.
“Improving our understanding of the Earth system is critically important as the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is forcing changes in all of its processes,” said Robert Detrick, assistant administrator of the NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and chairman of the NOAA Research Council. “The University of Colorado has been an excellent partner to NOAA in pursuing this mission.”
NOAA’s first cooperative institute, CIRES is marking its 45th anniversary this year and is now one of 18 NOAA cooperative institutes nationwide. NOAA competitively funds cooperative institutes at universities with strong research programs relevant to NOAA’s mission. These institutes provide resources and opportunities that extend beyond the agency’s own research capacity.
“Partnership in environmental research with the NOAA Boulder laboratories is the keystone of CIRES research,” said CIRES Interim Director William Lewis Jr. “We have great ambitions in joint research with NOAA over the next five years.”
The partnership allows researchers at CU-Boulder to receive support for research projects that may involve NOAA scientists, primarily at the Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder as well as other NOAA cooperative institutes.
The CIRES partnership will focus on nine research themes:
- Air quality in a changing environment
- Climate forcing feedbacks and analysis
- Earth systems dynamics, variability and change
- Management and exploitation of geophysical data
- Regional science and applications
- Scientific outreach and education
- Space weather understanding and predictability
- Stratospheric processes and trends
- Systems and prediction models development
“With pressing issues like air quality, climate change and space weather now at the forefront globally, the University of Colorado Boulder is eager to continue this crucial partnership with NOAA,” said CU-Boulder Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “CIRES is known around the world for advancing our understanding of the complex Earth system and as a premier institution in educating the next generation of environmental scientists.”
NOAA supports cooperative institutes to conduct research, education, training and outreach aligned with its mission. Cooperative institutes also promote the involvement of students and postdoctoral scientists in NOAA-funded research. This unique setting provides NOAA the benefit of working with the complementary capabilities of a research institution that contribute to NOAA-related sciences ranging from satellite climatology and fisheries biology to atmospheric chemistry and coastal ecology.
For more information on CIRES visit http://cires.colorado.edu/. For more information on NOAA Cooperative Institutes visit http://www.nrc.noaa.gov/ci.
New CU power plant aims for LEED gold certification
Aug 30th
carbon-conscious campus utility system
The first phase of construction on a University of Colorado Boulder campus utility project — which will provide efficient heating and cooling while significantly reducing the university’s carbon emissions — begins this week with utility work and construction staging on the south side of campus.
The project is expected to be complete in the winter of 2014 and involves three major components: renovation of the campus Power House on 18th Street; construction of a separate, new heating and cooling plant; and installation of new utility distribution systems.
“Safe, reliable and efficient energy is crucial for providing uninterrupted power that supports CU-Boulder’s educational and research mission,” said Steve Thweatt, executive director of Facilities Management. “This project will ensure that we can effectively consolidate the heating and cooling of a number of buildings on the Boulder campus while continuing to build our leadership in sustainability.”
The $91.1 million project, which is being funded through a combination of cash reserves and long-term debt proceeds, also will replace chiller and boiler equipment that is critical to campus operations.
Excavation will start at the beginning of September on the new heating and cooling plant, called the East District Energy Plant. Located near the Coors Events Center, the 72,000-square-foot facility will showcase energy efficiency concepts. In addition, the university is pursuing Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, gold certification for the building. LEED certification is a U.S. benchmark for sustainable design and construction.
As part of this project, workers will begin digging at several locations around campus in September, including 18th Street and Kittredge Loop Road, to install piping to deliver chilled water needed for campus air conditioning systems. The installation will allow the Kittredge residence complex to have air conditioning for the first time.
Next fall, renovation will begin on the original campus Power House, built in 1909. The Power House includes a cogeneration plant and will have its equipment replaced and upgraded such that the facility will be able to meet approximately 50 percent of the campus’s electrical power requirements using natural gas — a method that produces fewer carbon emissions than the local utility.
“We anticipate that natural gas will be an economic energy source for the campus for the future, which can be implemented as appropriate,” said Campus Architect Paul Leef.
As part of the renovation, the plant’s exhaust waste heat will be recovered and used to provide both heating and additional electrical power without burning extra fuel. It is estimated that the renovated Power House facility, which will be renamed the West District Energy Plant, will have the capability to reduce carbon emissions by nearly 30,000 metric tons per year.
“The two plants will be connected such that when the entire system is online, the plants will work in tandem with the upgraded distribution system to deliver a high level of efficiency and reliability, helping the campus reduce its carbon footprint,” said Moe Tabrizi, director of campus sustainability.
Fourmile canyon blaze yields new insight into climate change, CU scientists say
Aug 27th
heat-trapping effects of wildfire smoke particles
When the Fourmile Canyon Fire erupted west of Boulder in 2010, smoke from the wildfire poured into parts of the city including a site housing scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Within 24 hours, a few researchers at the David Skaggs Research Center had opened up a particle sampling port on the roof of the building and started pulling in smoky air for analysis by two custom instruments inside. They became the first scientists to directly measure and quantify some unique heat-trapping effects of wildfire smoke particles.
“For the first time we were able to measure these warming effects minute-by-minute as the fire progressed,” said CIRES scientist Dan Lack, lead author of the study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers also were able to record a phenomenon called the “lensing effect,” in which oils from the fire coat the soot particles and create a lens that focuses more light onto the particles. This can change the “radiative balance” in an area, sometimes leading to greater warming of the air and cooling of the surface.
While scientists had previously predicted such an effect and demonstrated it in laboratory experiments, the Boulder researchers were one of the first to directly measure the effect during an actual wildfire. Lack and his colleagues found that lensing increased the warming effect of soot by 50 to 70 percent.
“When the fire erupted on Labor Day, so many researchers came in to work to turn on instruments and start sampling that we practically had traffic jams on the road into the lab,” Lack said. “I think we all realized that although this was an unfortunate event, it might be the best opportunity to collect some unique data. It turned out to be the best dataset, perfectly suited to the new instrument we had developed.”
The instrument called a spectrophotometer can capture exquisite detail about all particles in the air, including characteristics that might affect the smoke particles’ tendency to absorb sunlight and warm their surroundings. While researchers know that overall, wildfire smoke can cause this lensing effect, the details have been difficult to quantify, in part because of sparse observations of particles from real-world fires.
Once the researchers began studying the data they collected during the fire, it became obvious that the soot from the wildfire was different in several key ways from soot produced by other sources — diesel engines, for example.
“When vegetation burns, it is not as efficient as a diesel engine, and that means some of the burning vegetation ends up as oils,” Lack said. In the smoke plume, the oils coated the soot particles and that microscopic sheen acted like a magnifying glass, focusing more light onto the soot particles and magnifying the warming of the surrounding air.
The researchers also discovered that the oils coating the soot were brown, and that dark coloration allowed further absorption of light, and therefore further warming the atmosphere around the smoke plume.
The additional warming effects mean greater heating of the atmosphere enveloped in dark smoke from a wildfire, and understanding that heating effect is important for understanding climate change, Lack said. The extra heating also can affect cloud formation, air turbulence, winds and even rainfall.
The discovery was made possible by state-of-the-art instruments developed by CIRES, NOAA and other scientists, Lack said. The instruments can capture fine-scale details about particles sent airborne by the fire, including their composition, shape, size, color and ability to absorb and reflect sunlight of various wavelengths.
“With such well-directed measurements, we can look at the warming effects of soot, the magnifying coating and the brown oils and see a much clearer, yet still smoky picture of the effect of forest fires on climate,” Lack said.