A professor of agronomy at Kansas State University, Dr. Jay Ham, will visit WSU on Oct. 29 and present a seminar on instrumentation developed by his research team to study surface-atmosphere exchange from animal feeding operations and native ecosystems. Dr. Ham is an expert in environmental physics and developed the environmental physics research program at K-State. Environmental physics combines physics, ecology, soil science and meteorology in an effort to understand and explain the transformation processes that govern the fate of energy and matter within soils, plants and the atmosphere.
Ham’s research program has developed several new sensor technologies and measurement techniques. Examples include heat balance sap flow gauges for small stems, dual-probe heat capacity sensors for measuring soil moisture, conditional sampling techniques for measuring mass flux in the boundary layer and chamber techniques for measuring trace gas fluxes.
In addition to environmental physics, Ham researches field-scale carbon budgets, global climate change, instrumentation development, and the effect of animal feeding operations on air and water quality.
Ham’s visit is sponsored by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Department of Animal Sciences, and CEREO.
