Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Innovative Research Program Projects, 2005

Sea ice on Mars? Earth-Mars Satellite Altimetry Comparison and Theoretical Modeling
Todd Arbetter and Ted Scambos will be contrasting recognized ice fracture patterns in the Antarctic to similar patterns on the Elysium Planitia as indications of past water dynamics on Mars.

Is Climate Change on the Tibetan Plateau Driven by Land Use/Cover Change?
Oliver Frauenfeld and Tingjun Zhang will be using AVHRR/NDVI data to compare climate warming sensitivities of high altitude and high latitude regions by determining the impacts of land use change in remote regions of Tibet.

Anthropogenic Carbon Forcing in a Simple Climate Model with Coupled Hydrological and Carbon Cycles
Vijay Gupta, Tom Chase and Keith Nordstrom will be investigating extreme floods and droughts in a climate model where biota exhibit the potential for modulating global temperatures that are comparable to IPCC predictions for CO2 doubling.

Mountain Temperatures at Fine Spatial Scales
Jessica Lundquist, Martyn Clark and Andrew Slater will be deploying small temperature probes along the Continental Divide to attain finer spatial resolution and determine how well meteorological stations represent surrounding topography.

Realization of Snow/Vegetation Interactions Using Field Spectroscopy
Noah Molotch and Thomas Painter will be quantifying the impact of vegetation on snow metamorphism to gain insight into how forest canopy density impacts snowmelt rates. This is a unique application of an ASD-FR contact probe to determine snow stratigraphy.

Collaborative studies of atmospheric aerosols
Maggie Tolbert, Becky Garland, A. Ravishankara, Ed Lovejoy and Tahllee Baynardwill be combining cavity ring-down spectroscopy with a differential mobility analyzer to probe the water uptake and optical properties of mixed organic-inorganic aerosols.