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Climate change is arguably one of the most important issues facing our planet.
And this is a difficult problem because we don't have a full understanding of
how much carbon we're producing to man-made sources or how much is
occurring from natural sources. And we also don't know how much is being
removed through oceanic uptake and photosynthesis. To solve this we need to
be able to measure carbon globally and have a long-term climate record. Both
NOAA and NASA scientists have been working on these problems and that's
where my research comes into play. My name is Emily Wilson
I'm the lab chief of the laser remote sensing lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center. I developed miniaturized instruments
that measure greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
One of these instruments is a miniaturized laser heterodyne radiometer,
and we call that the mini-LHR for short. Our vision is to develop a
low-cost global network of mini-LHR instruments to measure greenhouse gases.
To do this, we've partnered with AERONET. This is a global network of
about 500 instruments that measure aerosols in the atmosphere. We've
designed the mini-LHR to operate in tandem with the AERONET sun photometer
so that we can deploy our instrument into their network. The way the mini-LHR
works is that sunlight that's passed through greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere it's collected with optics that are connected to the side of a
AERONET sun tracker. So we mix sunlight with laser light to produce a
beat signal. And from this beat signal we can then calculate the concentration of
greenhouse gases in the atmospheric column. On a daily basis I work on
improvements to the instrument, so I'm working in the lab. I'm also working on
proposals and publications. And in addition, I manage the Laser Remote Sensing
Lab, which has about 30 people. The most exciting part of my job is testing an
instrument in the field. It's a completely different experience to get
an instrument working in the lab than it is in the field, for example on a volcano
at 11,000 feet. Instrument development is not like the science that you see
TV where something big happens all of a sudden. It's slow, steady progress to
develop your instrument. You're troubleshooting, you're trying to figure
out why things aren't working, you're improving components. And eventually you
create a characterized instrument that you can take to the field and deploy.
Everybody assumes that NASA is all space flight, but the reality is that
here we do a lot of earth science applications and work on projects to
protect our planet. Working on the mini-LHR is exciting because we're going to
produce a low cost instrument that can contribute to the global effort to
better understand climate change.
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