WSU Researchers Study Air Quality, Predict Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will put out a major report on global warming on Friday, Feb 2, which will outline the extent of expected warming and its environmental impacts, such as sea level rise. WSU researchers led by Brian Lamb, George Mount and Richard Gill are working to measure air quality and its influence in ecosystems, and to predict how it will affect life in the future.

How will global warming affect life in the Pacific Northwest? Looking 50 years into the future in the Pacific Northwest, researchers in the Washington State University Laboratory for Atmospheric Research have concluded that we can expect to see more days of poor air quality. Several cities in the region can expect to see an increase in the number of days in which they have unhealthy levels of smog and most cities will see higher ozone levels on future summer days.

With support from the Environmental Protection Agency and in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, University of Washington and the Pacific Northwest Forest Service Center, the group, led by Brian Lamb, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is modeling air quality in the U.S. in the middle of the 21st century.

The group is looking at such questions as how global warming will affect air quality on regional and urban scales, how land use change affects air quality and how fire and fire management affects regional air quality. 

The researchers used a combination of computer models that predict future climate change, meteorology and emissions to look at 36 kilometer grids in the continental U.S. in the present decade and a future decade in 2050. They also compared five current with five future summers. The researchers found that the biggest affects on future air quality come about from increases in pollutant emissions in the U.S. and globally, rather than from changes in area meteorology due to climate change.

For more information, contact Brian Lamb, blamb@wsu.edu, (509) 335-5702.

Improving Methods to Measure Climate Change.  Researchers in the Laboratory for Atmospheric Research are completing work on instrumentation that measures plant respiration in forests, an important factor in questions about climate change. 

The researchers, led by George Mount, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Graduate Student Maria Obiminda (Obie) Cambaliza, developed the instrumentation with support from a 4-year, $1.9 million, National Science Foundation grant.  

In much of the debate over climate change, scientists have been arguing over how carbon is stored in world ecosystems and how much is released into the atmosphere through biological processes like plant respiration and decomposition.

Scientists have a good idea of how much carbon dioxide is produced from various sources, including to reasonable accuracy how much is anthropogenically produced. They also know that the oceans and forests act as “sinks,” pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, storing it, and thereby reducing the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide. But, they have little understanding of how these sinks work, which sinks are most effective at pulling out carbon, and how exactly they affect the planet’s carbon balance.

To better understand carbon sequestration, Mount and Cambaliza developed new methods of making direct measurements of vegetative respiration, the rate at which plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen.

For more information, contact George Mount, mount@wsu.edu, (509) 335-3790

Response of Ecosystems to Climate Change. Richard Gill, assistant professor of environmental science, is working to understand how ecosystems are responding to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, including its impacts on nutrient cycles, carbon storage and water availability. 

Forest and grassland ecosystems have historically played an important role in slowing the accumulation of greenhouses gasses by locking carbon away in organic matter. However, the ability of ecosystems to act as a sink for carbon dioxide and help to balance the effects of our increased emissions is determined by feedbacks within ecosystems.

In collaboration with the USDA and researchers at Duke University, Gill is studying grassland in central Texas to better understand what controls the ability of soils and vegetation to remove carbon from the atmosphere. He believes we may be reaching the threshold at which vegetation and soils can act as a sink for man-made carbon dioxide emissions because of feedbacks between the carbon and nitrogen cycles in grassland soil. 

While many policy makers and atmospheric scientists hope that soils will continue to act as “sinks” for carbon to offset the production of CO₂ by burning fossil fuels, this research demonstrated that the size of these sinks may be limited.

Gill’s research group continues to focus on understanding how changes in climate and atmospheric chemistry influence native grassland ecosystems. Gill has published an article in Nature on his work and was interviewed by the BBC’s The World Today program.

For more information, contact Richard Gill, rgill@wsu.edu, (509) 335-6422.