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

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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.