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MANHATTAN, Kan. – Undergraduate students don’t often have the opportunity to conduct research alongside university faculty. But this summer, six undergraduates are involved in climate change research at Kansas State University and Wichita State University.
The opportunity was made possible through a National Science Foundation-Kansas Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research project that funds the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer Academy. The students in this year’s program encompass a range of backgrounds and experiences, said Chuck Rice, coordinator of the Climate Change and Mitigation portion of the NSF-EPSCoR project.
The projects are designed to help students understand climate change in greater depth, with a multidisciplinary team experience, Rice said. The departments of agronomy, biological and agricultural engineering, and physics participated.
Among the undergraduate students in this year’s academy:
Matt DeCapo - In the upper layers of the atmosphere, much is going on that has a big effect on the earth’s climate at ground level. The atmosphere consists of a web of particles and molecules which interact with energy coming from the sun and reflecting off the earth to result in the weather we experience on a daily basis.
The exact nature of these interactions and the role of aerosols in particular, is still a puzzle to scientists. Trying to solve at least one piece of that puzzle is Matt DeCapo, K-State senior majoring in physics and minoring in natural resources and environmental science. DeCapo, from Kansas City, Mo., has been working on an REU research project this summer under the supervision of Chris Sorensen, K-State university distinguished professor of physics. The research involves a look at the role of soot in the radiation balance of the atmosphere.
“Soot is an especially important aerosol particle in the atmosphere. Being dark, it absorbs more radiation than it reflects. This results in heating of the air around the particle and a cooling effect at the surface. And like all aerosols, it can play a role in cloud formation by serving as a surface onto which the water vapor in the air can condense. Still, there is great uncertainty in trying to quantify the effect of these particles for climate models,” DeCapo said.
After studying light and its interaction with matter with Sorensen for more than two years, DeCapo knows his way around the lasers and beam splitters. His research focused on conducting experiments to study light backscattering from soot. This will help increase the understanding of the effect of soot on the climate.
“The role of soot in both climate change and human health is important. Studies have suggested that soot is the second largest contributor to climate change behind carbon dioxide, as well as being one of the main factors accelerating the melting of the Arctic ice sheets,” DeCapo said.
More time will be devoted to this research before the fall semester, as well as during the coming academic year, DeCapo said. It is too early to make conclusions, but the experiment has produced some promising data.
“These experiments and measurements could be some of the first of their kind once they are completed. The information will help update climate models to be more accurate, as well as contribute to a greater understanding of soot so we can understand and possibly reduce its negative effects on human health and the planet,” he said.
The research DeCapo has done for the REU program will be useful to him in his professional career. He plans to go on to graduate school, and make use of the experience he gained this summer in experimental design and the scientific process.
Chris Dolezal - The value of climate data comes through the hard work of analysis and the discovery of long-term trends. Otherwise, the data is just a collection of daily measurements that can be mind-numbing to the casual observer.
That’s where Chris Dolezal’s research can help. A native of Wichita, Kan., Dolezal is working with Stacy Hutchinson, associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering, to discover trends in plant water use over the past 120 years.
“I’ve spent a lot of time working with spreadsheets during this research project,” Dolezal said. “We are evaluating three different computer models and data sources to analyze long-term evapotranspiration data across Kansas.”
Evapotranspiration (ET) is a measure of how much water is moving out of the soil, through plants, and into the atmosphere. ET rates are high when the weather is hot, dry, and windy. Rates are low when temperatures are mild and humidity levels are high.
The work of examining data from several locations over a 120-year period can be tedious, but the goal is important.
“We’re trying to find out if there has been any change in the frequency of extreme evapotranspiration events in Kansas,” he said. “This will give climate scientists another piece of the puzzle in understanding the way changes in the climate may be affecting plant growth and crop productivity.”
Dolezal will be a senior this fall at K-State. He is dual-majoring in biological and agricultural engineering and pre-med. His professional goal is to attend medical school.
“Any trends we discover in the occurrence of extreme evapotranspiration events applies to plants, but the same climate factors are affecting human health as well. It is helpful to know what climate trends are occurring that could have an impact on human health,” he said.
Dorothy Menefee - Not all soil carbon is the same in its ability to sequester carbon dioxide on a long-term basis. This was the general thesis given to Dorothy Menefee when she started her work in the REU program. Menefee was then allowed to decide how to build a research project to help answer some of the questions about the stability of different forms of soil carbon.
Luckily, Menefee is an agronomy major with a chemistry minor, and she knows her way around a laboratory, including high-tech equipment needed to do this kind of work.
“I wanted to take a closer look at the chemistry of soil carbon, and how that affects the stability of soil carbon under various management systems and soil conditions,” she explained. “Some forms of carbon are more stable than others, and the more stable the carbon is, the more effective it will be at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere for the long term, which is our ultimate goal.
Menefee took soils from plots under various agricultural management practices, separated out different organic materials, and analyzed the carbon fractions. She decided what kind of analysis to do and how to get it done, working with Ganga Hettiarachchi, K-State assistant professor of soil chemistry.
Although various steps are involved, the easy part is separating the soil organic material, said the Spring Hill, Kan. native. After this was done, selected samples were then prepared for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) analysis.
So far, she has only begun to discover the nature of the soil carbon in the different aggregate fractions of the soil, so she plans to continue the research.
“This has been a valuable experience, and I want to learn more. Eventually, I may go into the Peace Corps, then continue on in graduate school,” Menefee said. Meanwhile, the results of her research will help scientists understand more about the volatile nature of soil carbon and its role in greenhouse gas mitigation.
Zane Sumpter - One of the most critical, but often unappreciated, aspects of a large research project such as the NSF-EPSCoR “Climate Change and Energy” project is data management and preservation. Climate change research typically builds up massive amounts of data for use in computer modeling. The possibility of having that data lost or corrupted in any way is a constant source of concern.
At Wichita State University, Zane Sumpter and Lucas Burson have been working with assistant professor Bin Tang, to develop new and better ways to ensure data preservation. Sumpter, a native of Mulvane, Kan., will be a junior next academic year, majoring in computer science. He also attended Cowley County Community College. Burson, a native of Newton, is also a computer science major.
“As part of this undergraduate research program, I’ve been working on developing a new data preservation algorithm for the climate change project. The goal is to be able to preserve data within a network as long as possible,” Sumpter said.
Battery levels can get low and threaten the stability of stored data, he said. “To get around that, we use an algorithm that will bounce the data around between sensor nodes to ensure its integrity.”
“It’s been a unique experience,” said Sumpter, who plans a career in information technology. “I worked with an operating system I was not experienced with and was involved in a nationally important research effort.”
Amy Vu - Among the more difficult challenges in agricultural soils greenhouse gas mitigation research is the issue of how to measure and reduce nitrous oxide emissions. That is the problem that Amy Vu has been tackling, working under the direction of K-State Distinguished Professor of Agronomy, Chuck Rice.
A native of Kansas City, Kan., Vu will be a fifth-year senior this fall, majoring in agronomy at K-State with an emphasis in soils and environmental science. Her agronomy background came in handy as she did a combination of field sampling and laboratory work with soils as part of the project. The goal was to find out how agricultural management practices affect denitrification in the soil and nitrous oxide emissions.
“We went out once a week to take soil samples from research plots near Manhattan. Then we injected the samples into a gas chromatograph to analyze for nitrous oxide,” Vu said.
That was just the beginning. The true value as a teaching tool and professional development aid arose when the results came in.
“My results were just the opposite of what others had been finding in that the plots with compost fertilizer treatments were producing more nitrous oxide emissions than plots receiving commercial nitrogen fertilizers. This caused us to dig deeper into what was going on, and try to explain the unexpected results. We came up with some theories, based on the knowledge of other researchers here at K-State,” Vu said.
“Before this, I wasn’t really too aware of the issue of climate change and its relation to soil microbes,” she said.
Vu plans to make agronomy her profession, possibly in an international position since her minor is international relations.
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