The State of the Sciences is the College of Sciences’ most important public science and outreach event and took place on April 14, 2023, at the Hunt Library, Raleigh, NC.
Camilo and Jagriti participated in the event to familiarize the general public with atmospheric sciences instrumentation and discuss how atmospheric instrumentation is used to understand how ecosystems interact with the atmosphere.
We created a demo with some of the lab’s atmospheric science instrumentation: a sonic anemometer and an infrared gas analyzer for carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane. In the first test, we had people blow air through the sonic anemometer as hard as they can, and record the resulting wind speed. Our record for the night was 4.6 m/s!
In the second test, we used our portable infrared gas analyzer to have people check if they exhaled methane (approx 30-60% of the population does https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4909143/). While doing this we talked about how we use these instruments to measure methane fluxes in the field.
People had fun interacting with the instrumentation and several people were curious to know more about methane and how it is produced.
Integrative Biometeorology 