Greenhouse gas emissions from green waste composting windrow.

The process of composting is a source of greenhouse gases (GHG) that contribute to climate change. We monitored three field-scale green waste compost windrows over a one-year period to measure the seasonal variance of the GHG fluxes. The compost pile that experienced the wettest and coolest weather had the highest average CH4 emission of 254±76gCday-1 dry weight (DW) Mg-1 and lowest average N2O emission of 152±21mgNday-1 DW Mg-1compared to the other seasonal piles. The highest N2O emissions (342±41mgNday-1 DW Mg-1) came from the pile that underwent the driest and hottest weather. The compost windrow oxygen (O2) concentration and moisture content were the most consistent factors predicting N2O and CH4 emissions from all seasonal compost piles. Compared to N2O, CH4 was a higher contributor to the overall global warming potential (GWP) expressed as CO2 equivalents (CO2 eq.). Therefore, CH4 mitigation practices, such as increasing O2 concentration in the compost windrows through moisture control, feedstock changes to increase porosity, and windrow turning, may reduce the overall GWP of composting. Based on the results of the present study, statewide total GHG emissions of green waste composting were estimated at 789,000Mg of CO2 eq., representing 2.1% of total annual GHG emissions of the California agricultural sector and 0.18% of the total state emissions.

Dynamic temperature and humidity environmental profiles: impact for future emergency and disaster preparedness and response.

INTRODUCTION: During disasters and complex emergencies, environmental conditions can adversely affect the performance of point-of-care (POC) testing. Knowledge of these conditions can help device developers and operators understand the significance of temperature and humidity limits necessary for use of POC devices. First responders will benefit from improved performance for on-site decision making. OBJECTIVE: To create dynamic temperature and humidity profiles that can be used to assess the environmental robustness of POC devices, reagents, and other resources (eg, drugs), and thereby, to improve preparedness. METHODS: Surface temperature and humidity data from the National Climatic Data Center (Asheville, North Carolina USA) was obtained, median hourly temperature and humidity were calculated, and then mathematically stretched profiles were created to include extreme highs and lows. Profiles were created for: (1) Banda Aceh, Indonesia at the time of the 2004 Tsunami; (2) New Orleans, Louisiana USA just before and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005; (3) Springfield, Massachusetts USA for an ambulance call during the month of January 2009; (4) Port-au-Prince, Haiti following the 2010 earthquake; (5) Sendai, Japan for the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami with comparison to the colder month of January 2011; (6) New York, New York USA after Hurricane Sandy made landfall in 2012; and (7) a 24-hour rescue from Hawaii USA to the Marshall Islands. Profiles were validated by randomly selecting 10 days and determining if (1) temperature and humidity points fell inside and (2) daily variations were encompassed. Mean kinetic temperatures (MKT) were also assessed for each profile. RESULTS: Profiles accurately modeled conditions during emergency and disaster events and enclosed 100% of maximum and minimum temperature and humidity points. Daily variations also were represented well with 88.6% (62/70) of temperature readings and 71.1% (54/70) of relative humidity readings falling within diurnal patterns. Days not represented well primarily had continuously high humidity. Mean kinetic temperature was useful for severity ranking. CONCLUSIONS: Simulating temperature and humidity conditions clearly reveals operational challenges encountered during disasters and emergencies. Understanding of environmental stresses and MKT leads to insights regarding operational robustness necessary for safe and accurate use of POC devices and reagents. Rescue personnel should understand these principles before performing POC testing in adverse environments.

Surface renewal: an advanced micrometeorological method for measuring and processing field-scale energy flux density data.

Advanced micrometeorological methods have become increasingly important in soil, crop, and environmental sciences. For many scientists without formal training in atmospheric science, these techniques are relatively inaccessible. Surface renewal and other flux measurement methods require an understanding of boundary layer meteorology and extensive training in instrumentation and multiple data management programs. To improve accessibility of these techniques, we describe the underlying theory of surface renewal measurements, demonstrate how to set up a field station for surface renewal with eddy covariance calibration, and utilize our open-source turnkey data logger program to perform flux data acquisition and processing. The new turnkey program returns to the user a simple data table with the corrected fluxes and quality control parameters, and eliminates the need for researchers to shuttle between multiple processing programs to obtain the final flux data. An example of data generated from these measurements demonstrates how crop water use is measured with this technique. The output information is useful to growers for making irrigation decisions in a variety of agricultural ecosystems. These stations are currently deployed in numerous field experiments by researchers in our group and the California Department of Water Resources in the following crops: rice, wine and raisin grape vineyards, alfalfa, almond, walnut, peach, lemon, avocado, and corn.

Observed increase in local cooling effect of deforestation at higher latitudes.

Deforestation in mid- to high latitudes is hypothesized to have the potential to cool the Earth's surface by altering biophysical processes. In climate models of continental-scale land clearing, the cooling is triggered by increases in surface albedo and is reinforced by a land albedo-sea ice feedback. This feedback is crucial in the model predictions; without it other biophysical processes may overwhelm the albedo effect to generate warming instead. Ongoing land-use activities, such as land management for climate mitigation, are occurring at local scales (hectares) presumably too small to generate the feedback, and it is not known whether the intrinsic biophysical mechanism on its own can change the surface temperature in a consistent manner. Nor has the effect of deforestation on climate been demonstrated over large areas from direct observations. Here we show that surface air temperature is lower in open land than in nearby forested land. The effect is 0.85 ± 0.44 K (mean ± one standard deviation) northwards of 45° N and 0.21 ± 0.53 K southwards. Below 35° N there is weak evidence that deforestation leads to warming. Results are based on comparisons of temperature at forested eddy covariance towers in the USA and Canada and, as a proxy for small areas of cleared land, nearby surface weather stations. Night-time temperature changes unrelated to changes in surface albedo are an important contributor to the overall cooling effect. The observed latitudinal dependence is consistent with theoretical expectation of changes in energy loss from convection and radiation across latitudes in both the daytime and night-time phase of the diurnal cycle, the latter of which remains uncertain in climate models.

Stand-level gas-exchange responses to seasonal drought in very young versus old Douglas-fir forests of the Pacific Northwest, USA.

This study examines how stand age affects ecosystem mass and energy exchange response to seasonal drought in three adjacent Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) forests. The sites include two early seral (ES) stands (0-15 years old) and an old-growth (OG) (approximately 450-500 years old) forest in the Wind River Experimental Forest, Washington, USA. We use eddy covariance flux measurements of carbon dioxide (F(NEE)), latent energy (lambdaE) and sensible heat (H) to derive evapotranspiration rate (E(T)), Bowen ratio (beta), water use efficiency (WUE), canopy conductance (G(c)), the Priestley-Taylor coefficient (alpha) and a canopy decoupling factor (Omega). The canopy and bulk parameters are examined to find out how ecophysiological responses to water stress, including changes in relative soil water content ((r)) and vapour pressure deficit (deltae), differ among the two forest successional stages. Despite different rainfall patterns in 2006 and 2007, we observed site-specific diurnal patterns of E(T), alpha, G(c), deltae and (r) during both years. The largest stand differences were (1) at the OG forest high morning G(c) (> 10 mm s(-1)) coincided with high net CO(2) uptake (F(NEE) = -9 to -6 micromol m(-2) s(-1)), but a strong negative response in OG G(c) to moderate deltae was observed later in the afternoons and subsequently reduced daily E(T) and (2) at the ES stands total E(T) was higher (+72 mm) because midday G(c) did not decrease until very low water availability levels ((r) < 30%) were reached at the end of the summer. Our results suggest that ES stands are more likely than mature forests to experience constraints on gas exchange if the dry season becomes longer or intensifies because water conserving ecophysiological responses were observed in the youngest stands only at the very end of the seasonal drought.

Flux partitioning in an old-growth forest: seasonal and interannual dynamics.

Turbulent fluxes of carbon, water and energy were measured at the Wind River Canopy Crane, Washington, USA from 1999 to 2004 with eddy-covariance instrumentation above (67 m) and below (2.5 m) the forest canopy. Here we present the decomposition of net ecosystem exchange of carbon (NEE) into gross primary productivity (GPP), ecosystem respiration (R(eco)) and tree canopy net CO(2) exchange (DeltaC) for an old-growth Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco)-western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.) forest. Significant amounts of carbon were recycled within the canopy because carbon flux measured at the below-canopy level was always upward. Maximum fluxes reached 4-6 micromol m(-2) s(-1) of CO(2) into the canopy air space during the summer months, often equaling the net downward fluxes measured at the above-canopy level. Ecosystem respiration rates deviated from the expected exponential relationship with temperature during the summer months. An empirical ecosystem stress term was derived from soil water content and understory flux data and was added to the R(eco) model to account for attenuated respiration during the summer drought. This attenuation term was not needed in 1999, a wet La Niña year. Years in which climate approximated the historical mean, were within the normal range in both NEE and R(eco), but enhanced or suppressed R(eco) had a significant influence on the carbon balance of the entire stand. In years with low respiration the forest acts as a strong carbon sink (-217 g C m(-2) year(-1)), whereas years in which respiration is high can turn the ecosystem into a weak to moderate carbon source (+100 g C m(-2) year(-1)).

Contributions of evaporation, isotopic non-steady state transpiration and atmospheric mixing on the delta18O of water vapour in Pacific Northwest coniferous forests.

Changes in the 2H and 18O of atmospheric water vapour provide information for integrating aspects of gas exchange within forest canopies. In this study, we show that diurnal fluctuations in the oxygen isotope ratio (delta 18O) as high as 4% per hundred were observed for water vapour (delta (18)Ovp) above and within an old-growth coniferous forest in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Values of delta 18Ovp decreased in the morning, reached a minimum at midday, and recovered to early-morning values in the late afternoon, creating a nearly symmetrical diurnal pattern for two consecutive summer days. A mass balance budget was derived and assessed for the 18O of canopy water vapour over a 2-d period by considering the 18O-isoflux of canopy transpiration, soil evaporation and the air entering the canopy column. The budget was used to address two questions: (1) do delta 18O values of canopy water vapour reflect the biospheric influence, or are such signals swamped by atmospheric mixing? and (2) what mechanisms drive temporal variations of delta 18Ovp? Model calculations show that the entry of air into the canopy column resulted in an isotopically depleted 18O-isoflux in the morning of day 1, causing values of delta 18Ovp, to decrease. An isotopically enriched 18O-isoflux resulting from transpiration then offset this decreased delta 18Ovp later during the day. Contributions of 18O-isoflux from soil evaporation were relatively small on day 1 but were more significant on day 2, despite the small H2(16)O fluxes. From measurements of leaf water volume and sapflux, we determined the turnover time of leaf water in the needles of Douglas-fir trees as approximately 11 h at midday. Such an extended turnover time suggests that transpiration may not have occurred at the commonly assumed isotopic steady state. We tested a non-steady state model for predicting delta 18O of leaf water. Our model calculations show that assuming isotopic steady state increased isoflux of transpiration. The impact of this increase on the modelled delta 18Ovp was clearly detectable, suggesting the importance of considering isotopic non-steady state of transpiration in studies of forest 18O water balance.