A cheesehead19 update!

[Ankur Desai]

Hello CHEESEHEAD19 fans,

You might have thought this list was moribund, but it’s not fully out yet! Yesterday, Jan 31 marked the final end date of the original main NSF award that supported CHEESEHEAD19 and I’m proud of all the accomplishments we have made over the 6 years, despite some of the challenges related to the pandemic closures and travel limitations. 

In my own lab, we had a healthy number of post-docs, PhD, MS, undergraduate, and high school students pass through our doors and work on this project, all of whom are now onto new positions or furthering their education. These would include newly minted Dr. Sreenath Paleri, now a post-doc at NOAA in Boulder and Dr. Bailey Murphy, now a researcher at DOE ORNL. 

The project has produced a total of 24 peer-reviewed papers, plus at least 5 more in review and several in preparation. The BAMS paper in past 2 years got >50 citations. Already in 2024, three new publications have come out:

Former post-doc Brian’s paper on tower energy balance and the impact of spatial EC on energy imbalance was published in a special issue (open access): Butterworth, B.J., Desai, A.R., Durden, D., Kadum, H., LaLuzerne, D., Mauder, M., Metzger, S., Paleri, S., Wanner, L., 2024. Characterizing Energy Balance Closure over a Heterogeneous Ecosystem Using Multi-Tower Eddy Covariance. Frontiers in Earth Science, 11:1251138, doi:10.3389/feart.2023.1251138. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2023.1251138 

Paul Stoy’s lab also had a recent MS student publish her work on evapotranspiration partitioning at the CHEESEHEAD towers: Shveyster, V., Stoy, P., Butterworth, B., Wiesner, S., Skaggs, T., Murphy, B., Wutzler, T., El-Madany, T., Desai, A.R., 2024. Evaporation and transpiration from multiple proximal forests and wetlands. Water Resources Research, 60, e2022WR033757, doi:10.1029/2022WR033757 https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR033757 

Collaborator Heping Liu worked on a related modeling project on energy imbalance and its impact on CO2 flux bias that builds off of our work: Liu, H., Liu, C., Huang, J., Desai, A.R., Zhang, Q., Ghannam, K., Katul, G., 2024. Scalar Flux Profiles in the Unstable Atmospheric Surface Layer Under the Influence of Large Eddies: Implications for Eddy Covariance Flux Measurements and the Non‐Closure Problem. Geophys. Res. Lett., 51, e2023GL106649, doi:10.1029/2023GL106649.  https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL106649 

Last year also saw Michael Vermeuel’s paper on phenological impacts on BVOC compounds out: Vermeuel, M. P., Novak, G. A., Kilgour, D. B., Claflin, M. S., Lerner, B. M., Trowbridge, A. M., Thom, J., Cleary, P. A., Desai, A. R., and Bertram, T. H., 2023. Observations of biogenic volatile organic compounds over a mixed temperate forest during the summer to autumn transition, Atmos. Chem. Phys. 23, 4123–4148, doi:10.5194/acp-23-4123-2023. https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/23/4123/2023/ 

Also Guo Lin at U Colorado along with the U Wyoming King Air crew has a paper just accepted in JGR-Atmos looking at spatial scales of water vapor variability from the UWKA observations including the Compact Raman Lidar at: Lin, G., Wang, Z., Chu, Y., Ziegler, C., Hu, X.-M., Xue, M., Geerts, B., Paleri, S., Desai, A.R., Yang, K., Deng, M., DeGraw, J., 2023. Airborne Measurements of Scale-Dependent Latent Heat Flux Impacted by Water Vapor and Vertical Velocity over Heterogeneous Land Surfaces During the CHEESEHEAD19 Campaign. J Geophys Res.-Atmospheres, #2023JD039586, accepted. Preprint at: https://essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10.22541/essoar.168869292.23688953 

Papers on the large eddy simulation results have been submitted, including in two in review by Sreenath Paleri and also by KIT/TU-Dresden student Luise Wanner. Patricia Cleary’s lab has a paper in review on ozone profiles at the tall tower. 

Do share if you have other recent findings or new projects or papers in the works or out. I know projects are still underway with the hyperspectral imaging and plant traits/carbon cycling in Phil Townsend’s lab with researcher Ting Zheng, mapping of water bodies, evaluation of high resolution mesoscale models and a scaling perspectives paper. New graduate student in my lab Emily Mather <ema...@wisc.edu> is plugging away at a CHEESEHEAD wide advection budget that we hope to have ready this summer.

This year, Stefan Metzger and I have new funding from NSF to move forward on the Environmental Response Function approach to improve model-data comparison and energy imbalance at flux towers, building off the work done here. New post-doc Bethany Blakely <bbla...@wisc.edu> has joined the team and is working closely with both of us on getting up to speed on the wealth of data collected here and the possibilities of new science that can be done with it.

I thank all of you over the past 6 years in bringing this field experiment together and persevering through the pandemic to get so many research results out. Of course, if you still have data or documentation to deposit or update, please work with NCAR EOL to do so! 

Hope to see many of you somewhere down the road.

Take care,

ankur desai

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Dr. Ankur R Desai

Professor and Chair

Dept of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences

University of Wisconsin - Madison

https://flux.aos.wisc.edu de...@aos.wisc.edu @profdesai

O: +1-608-520-0305 / M: +1-608-218-4208

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