SCALES #3
Hello!
Over time I've learned there's an entire atlas's worth of atmospheric chemistry place names. The most famous is probably Mauna Loa, home of the Keeling Curve, but there are many more that regularly show up in papers and presentations.
One reason for this repetition of locations is because continuity in data sets is a priority—the measurements you take today become that much more valuable when you also know what was measured at the same location one, five, twenty, or more years ago (and if we know that we'll be able to keep making similar measurements over say, the next four to eight years...). I was reminded of that at a talk last week: the speaker, who was reporting measurements of the complicated mix of emissions around Colorado's Front Range, said in the Q&A that they have only a very limited record of what baseline emissions were like northeast of Denver before a recent boom in fossil fuel extraction operations in the area (though extractive drilling has been taking place in the area for decades, to some extent).
A more short-term field campaign can be what's notable about other sites. At a location that may have a more limited long-term record of measurements, a large group of scientists descend (or ascend, as the case may be) to collect as complete of a set of measurements as possible, during a single season. Between planning for the campaign, the campaign itself, and the multiyear process of working up and disseminating data, running models, and communicating results, active discussion of these campaigns easily stretches over a five-year timespan, causing recent ones to loom large in my short research career.
Some sites can seem willfully remote because of an interest in background conditions. Though it's important to understand what's coming right out of the metaphorical tailpipe of a large urban area, particularly over longer time periods it's equally important to have a sense of what a more representative set of regional or global conditions are. By taking measurements far away from strongly emitting regions, day-to-day variability gets smeared out and it's possible to look at the bigger picture.
Finally, there's no question the network of measurements are densest over the West, or the global North. It's expensive to build the infrastructure to make these measurements. Many of the high-profile scientists coordinating this work are affiliated with universities or government agencies in North America or Europe. The World Meteorological Organization's Global Atmosphere Watch program has stations across the globe, as does NOAA's somewhat overlapping Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, but in terms of detailed studies of regional atmospheric chemistry, there's no question that the southeast United States has been studied extensively, whereas pretty much anywhere in Africa is severely understudied, despite megacities such as Lagos having severe air quality problems.
So, based on all of that, I read and hear about places like Pellston, Michigan; Horicon, Wisconsin; Centreville, Alabama; Utah's Uintah Basin; Mace Head, Ireland; Hohenpeißenberg, Germany; Jungfraujoch, Switzerland; Summit, Greenland; Hyytiälä, Finland; Manacapuru, Brazil; Italy's Po Valley; China's Pearl River Delta.
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
Kimchi Diplomacy, feat. kimchi in space.
I Mean, by Kate Colby, discussed on Poem Talk.
Learning about Ely Cathedral's Lady chapel, and the layers of pagan, medieval, and Reformation history therein, with Janina Ramirez. (Learning there is such a thing as a Lady chapel.)
Newsletter issues of note
Ethan Iverson on gigs that were cool at the time, and amazingly cool in retrospect: "At the least, Stubblefield was surely one of the greatest jazz drummers in Wisconsin at that time -- which, admittedly, is not saying all that much. Still. Clyde Stubblefield. Damn!"
Joy L. Rankin in Lady Science on Florence Nightingale: "Honoring and remembering Nightingale as an intelligent, resolute, and queer polymath—mathematician, data visualizer, reformer, educator, nurse, colleague, companion, sister, daughter—gives us a nuanced and multifaceted heroine."
Links
Finally got around to the monumental undercover private prison piece from last year.
"Known as the mur-écran or “windscreen,” the structure is nearly a mile in length and shaped roughly like a horizontal V or chevron. Think of it as a climatological Maginot Line, a fortification against the sky built to resist the howling, near-constant northern winds."
Careful unpacking of how over-broad and -optimistic statements by a professor, coupled to science journalists hungry for an exciting story, leads to misleading headlines about woolly mammoths returning in two years
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Fighting through wordy bad habits.
—Adam