CGRER has welcomed five new members to its ranks in the last year. Here’s an introduction to them and to their work.

Bill Eichinger, a former research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, came to the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research and the UI’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in January, 1997. Eichinger, a hydrometeorologist and experimentalist, studies atmospheric transport and surface-atmosphere processes of diverse atmospheric variables, such as evaporating moisture, rainfall, air pollutants, and even the wind. His extremely precise measurements are taken using laser-based instruments, including laser-radar instruments known as lidar. These measurements allow him to characterize the earth’s surface and its impact on the atmosphere, the partitioning of solar energy into latent and sensible heat, and the emission rates of a variety of substances into the atmosphere -- all of which affect the weather. Bill’s goal is to improve theoretical understanding of earth-atmosphere interactions on a micro-scale, thus providing a detailed but crucial component of the large-scale weather and global change story. His membership in CGRER, he states, allows him to relate his efforts to those of multiple disciplines investigating global atmospheric changes over extended time periods. By dialoging with others concerned broadly with global climate change, and by discussing with them what we don’t know and what we need to know, he ensures that his work remains in context and relevant.

Tom Hasenberg, previously a research project manager at Hughes Research Laboratory in Malibu, CA, who works with semiconductor materials and devices, joined the UI’s Department of Physics and Astronomy in May of 1997. Tom came to CGRER to connect with other researchers who might need to use the products of his research: the mid-wave infrared lasers he and his colleagues develop that can detect, for example, minute amounts of atmospheric pollutants. Tom describes himself as a practical-minded person who is driven by applications. He is most positive about the potential uses of his sophisticated lasers in environmental monitoring devices and medical diagnostics. CGRER allows him opportunities to discuss the former with researchers such as Bill Eichinger. "The more we realize the effects we have had on the natural environment, the more we will need to do to address those effects," states Tom, "and monitoring environmental changes with our lasers and other such devices is the first step in the process."

Keri Hornbuckle taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo before transferring her allegiance to the UI’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the fall of 1998. She states that she is delighted to be here, not only because she is a native Iowan and loves the state, but also because of the excellent facilities she has for her research into the fate and transfer of atmospheric organic pollutants. Keri’s efforts focus on persistent agricultural and industrial compounds such as PCBs, DDT, atrazine, and hexachlorobenzene, that are likely to circulate through the atmosphere for some time following their release. She monitors and analyzes the transfer of such compounds between various interfaces, for example from the atmosphere to lakes, soil, or vegetation. Keri was interested in joining CGRER in part because climate (and thus climate change) influences the circulation and transfer of organic pollutants in a major way. In addition, the substance of her research efforts -- field studies, performing analyses for trace pollutants, and modeling their transfer -- provide data that support, or may be supported by, climate and atmospheric circulation models being used and developed by other CGRER researchers. Keri hopes that being a CGRER member will magnify the impact of her work by allowing communication and collaboration with other CGRER members interested in atmospheric processes, and that through collaboration her studies will have a greater influence on other scientists and on policy makers.

Hong Jiang came to the UI Department of Geography in the fall of 1997 from her graduate studies at Clark University in Worcester, MA. There, as here, she investigated Critical Zones: specific regions where environmental change may be critical to the health of the global environment. More specifically, she has been studying land degradation, soil erosion, and sandification in the Ordos Plateau, Inner Mongolia, China. She asks how these environmental changes are linked to their human dimensions, especially social and cultural change: how the changing environment both affects human life and is affected by human factors. She also examines the links between regional land use/cover change and global change. Although her research involves field work, important tools of her trade include remote sensing, computer modeling, and GIS. Hong also teaches classes on GIS and remote sensing, as well as on the human dimensions of global change. She hopes that her connection to CGRER will provide a vehicle for communicating with others who are teaching about global change and performing related research, and that it may involve her in collaborative interdisciplinary environment-related research with other CGRER members.

Dave McGinnis was a Research Scientist at the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences (CIRES) before he came to the UI’s Geography Department in the fall of 1997. He is concerned with how well global and regional climate models simulate water resources, especially in relation to high-elevation snowpack. Understanding of the snowpack--water resource relationship is crucial to the management of the western dam and reservoir system. Dave is attempting to create trustworthy statistical models that translate across scales -- that is, to relate large-scale atmospheric variables accurately to small-scale surface variables. His efforts to move climate models from the global to the local level are crucial to deciphering global change because, as Dave says, "global change -- and its impact on humans -- occurs on a local level." Dave says that joining CGRER was the natural thing for him to do. "The purpose in doing research is to bring new information, in an integrated sense, to our understanding of the changing relationship between humans and the earth. CGRER is a vehicle for that multidisciplinary integration," Dave claims.