Crosspost: An Observatory Spied on LA's Carbon Emissions—From Space

Written By Katrina Miller

Eldering's team created this video showing the aggregation of different "swaths" or strips of data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-3) taken over metropolitan Los Angeles

While most people might be attracted by the perpetually sunny skies, nearby ocean, or mountains hugging the Los Angeles basin, environmental engineer Annmarie Eldering was drawn to the city’s smog. “It’s the best place to go,” she says. “You’ve got tons of pollution!”

Urban areas release over 70 percent of human-made carbon dioxide emissions that wind up in the atmosphere, and LA is no exception. With over 13 million residents in its larger metropolitan area, a sophisticated network of freeways, and an international transportation hub, LA produces the fifth-most CO2 of all the cities in the world. That makes it a sweet spot for studying the role humans play in climate change.

Eldering is the project scientist for NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3, or OCO-3, an instrument that measures atmospheric CO2 levels from space to better understand the impact of human activity on the natural carbon cycle, the process by which plants, soil, oceans, and the atmosphere exchange carbon with each other. In a paper published this month, Eldering and her colleagues released a map showing the most detailed variations of CO2 emissions over the LA basin ever seen from space. This research demonstrates that space-based monitors can be used to collect large swaths of data over pollution hot spots, information that could help inform policy to combat climate change.

“What’s exciting about the OCO-3 result is that this is the first time we’ve gotten this kind of area map over a city like LA from space,” says Joshua Laughner, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who works on a global ground-based monitoring system called the Total Carbon Column Observing Network.

Read the rest of the article, written by the Women in Astronomy blog team's very own, Katrina Miller, here:
https://www.wired.com/story/an-observatory-spied-on-las-carbon-emissions-from-space/

How Workplace Climate Changes the Knowledge We Generate

Reproduced from the June 2014 Issue of STATUS: A Report on Women in Astronomy.  The article below is written by Meg Urry, Yale University, Department of Physics and Department of Astronomy. Based on a keynote address given at the University of California ADVANCE Roundtable in April 2014, at UC Davis

Some years ago, at a major US university, a visiting faculty candidate was told by a senior colleague – an influential, Nobel prize-winning director of a major institute at that university – that she would not be welcome to work with him, that he would not allocate his institute’s resources to her, and that his research group would be reluctant to talk to her because they were basically in competition with her.

She wisely decided to build her career elsewhere, but not before describing the problem and leaking his email to others at the university. The ensuing scandal created a classic conflict between bad behavior and first-rate science.

Charting a New Course in Physics Education

The following is a guest post by four members of the Compass Project: Nathaniel Roth, Punit Gandhi, Gloria Lee, and Joel Corbo.

The first year of college can be especially tough for a student interested in pursuing the physical sciences: Daunting assignments. Competition for grades. Uninspiring lectures. And, perhaps most overwhelming of all, a feeling of isolation in the face of it all.

Finding a supportive community can be crucial in order to persevere in this transition. It’s certainly easier to grasp the difficult ideas presented in lecture and in the homework when discussing them comfortably with friends. More profound, however, is the sense of being welcomed into a group where one can feel some notion of belonging.

The quest for community is harder for students who feel like outsiders at the outset. Gender, race, socioeconomic status, and other factors can act as immediate barriers. When the inevitable struggles with the subject material arise, it can be easier for students to drift away when they feel they never really belonged in the first place.

With these ideas in mind, in 2006 a group of physics graduate students at UC Berkeley saw an opportunity to make their department a more diverse and welcoming place. They launched an ambitious program called the Compass Project designed to foster a more inclusive, creative, and collaborative scientific community, aimed especially at incoming undergraduates in the physical sciences.  Since then, Compass has grown into a vibrant organization that has improved the academic experience for nearly 100 undergraduates and dozens of graduate students. The American Physical Society presented Compass with the 2012 Award for Improving Undergraduate Physics Education.

We have recently been given an opportunity to tell the story of Compass' founding and its subsequent achievements in a Points of View column on Physics Today online (the pre-print can be found here).  Many of the ideas mentioned above are discussed in more detail, along with a host of additional information. We encourage you to read the article to learn more, and we hope that you'll find that our organization's philosophy resonates with your own.