MRI: Development of a New Instrument to Observe Isotopic Fluxes of Methane and Carbon Dioxide from Arctic Melt Regions, to Link Carbon Fluxes, Climate Feedbacks and Sea Level Rise

该奖项由2009年《美国复苏和再投资法》(公法111-5)资助。该项目的主要目标是建造新一代可现场部署的仪器，能够同时确定从北半球高纬度永久冻土区的碳库排放的二氧化碳和甲烷的同位素差异性(碳-12和碳-13)通量，因为这些系统随着气温的升高而融化。来自北极碳库的这些碳同位素通量的测定是一组极其重要的观测，对于预测热流进入这些系统所造成的气候强迫的速度和不可逆性是必要的。利用一种结合了多个技术前沿最新进展的新仪器，将以必要的精度和可追踪的精度实时观测这些同位素通量。该仪器包括：在50厘米单元中实现2至4公里路径长度的集成腔输出光谱(ICOS)、基于现场可编程门阵列的控制电子设备、先进的中红外电光技术以及用于数据分析的高级软件拟合例程。这一仪器开发项目将反映哈佛大学气候研究的高度跨学科性质，直接将地球和行星科学系、化学和化学生物系的教师、博士后科学家、研究生和本科生联系在一起。和工程与应用科学学院，并将与哈佛大学环境中心合作。新的观测将包括与研究现场数据与区域模型融合的同事、研究中高纬度水库二氧化碳和甲烷释放的生物地球化学的同事、研究古记录的同事、参与开发气候预测计算机建模策略的同事以及与哈佛大学和全国其他大学的本科生和研究生群体开展的高度协作活动。从概念到完成，学生层面的参与是至关重要的，不仅对拟议中的碳同位素仪器的成功建造和部署至关重要，对美国更广泛的科学未来也是如此，美国的科学未来将更加依赖于科学家的培训和哲学，他们的培训和哲学以物理科学为中心，为关键的社会目标服务。由于碳通量问题的规模，该仪器的设计将免费提供给更广泛的气候研究社区。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The primary objective of this project is to construct a new generation of field-deployable instrumentation capable of establishing simultaneously the isotopically differentiated (carbon-12 and carbon-13) fluxes of carbon dioxide and methane emitted from the carbon reservoirs of the high latitude permafrost regions of the Northern Hemisphere as these systems melt with the advance of increased temperatures. The determination of the fluxes of these carbon isotopes from Arctic carbon reservoirs is a critically important set of observations that is needed for the prediction of both the rate and irreversibility of the climate forcing resulting from the flow of heat into these systems. Observing these isotopic fluxes with the requisite precision and traceable accuracy in real time will be achieved with a new instrument that combines recent advances on multiple technological fronts including: Integrated Cavity Output Spectroscopy (ICOS) to achieve path lengths of 2 to 4 kilometers in a 50 centimeter cell, field-programmable gate-array based control electronics, advanced mid-infrared electro-optic technology, and high-level software fitting routines for data analysis.This instrumentation development project will reflect the highly interdisciplinary nature of climate research at Harvard that directly links faculty, postdoctoral scientists, graduate and undergraduate students across the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and will engage the Harvard University Center for the Environment. The new observations will involve highly collaborative activities with colleagues studying the fusion of in situ data with regional models, with colleagues studying the biogeochemistry of carbon dioxide and methane release from reservoirs at mid and high latitudes, with colleagues studying the paleorecord, with colleagues involved in developing computer modeling strategies for climate forecasting, and with the large community of undergraduates and graduate students at Harvard and at other universities across the country. Student-level engagement from concept to completion is crucial, not only to the successful construction and deployment of the proposed carbon isotope instrument, but to the broader scientific future of the United States, which will come to rely even more on scientists whose training and philosophy is centered on the physical sciences in the service of key societal objectives. Because of the scale of the carbon flux problem, the design of the instrument will be made freely available to the broader climate research community.