Research News

Discussions or news related to research of MESAS group members

Unusually Bad Air Quality in North Carolina

November 16, 2016 by Brian Magi

Many communities in western North Carolina and in the Queen City of Charlotte have been and continue to be impacted by smoke pollution from fires on the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains near Lake Lure and South Mountain State Park. The smoke is moving through the near-surface atmosphere with the wind and being trapped

Image from the NASA MODIS sensor tweeted out by Brad Panovich at https://twitter.com/wxbrad/status/798969527417634823

near the surface by a cold layer of air that forms overnight under what is called a surface temperature inversion. The inversion means that colder, denser air resides below warmer air, and because this is a relatively stable situation, the inversion traps any surface pollution near the surface. This is bad for people, since the surface is the part of the atmosphere we all live in, but the pollution event presents a very unique opportunity to collect data. Unique data is always interesting to scientists.

Earlier this calendar year, I worked as a part of an art-data-science initiative called Keeping Watch on Air, which was a big team of people from UNC Charlotte and Clean Air Carolina to work on how we talk about Air Quality in the Queen City. Clean Air Carolina spearheaded the Particle Falls art-science exhibition, which I hope everyone saw – it was amazing. Keeping Watch was/is a grassroots effort (no one gets paid) to bring broad expertise, stakeholders, and other agents together on a problem we all agree is important. One part of that project was an effort to figure out how to think about the air quality data scientists like me try to understand. Usually this kind of data is presented in “micrograms per cubic meter” or as an index called the Air Quality Index. I was working with Alisa Wickliff at the UNC Charlotte Center for STEM Education and a group of K-8 Teachers and Students on a science project where they collected air quality data, and I analyzed/processed it. Perfect for everyone! Crista Cammaroto (College of Arts and Architecture, Director of the Projective Eye Gallery at UNC Charlotte Center City) and I thought up a way to talk about Keeping Watch data that was in terms of something we all think about with air pollution: Particles per breath. We wanted to give people a sense of how much your body deals with in every breath, and what it looks like for polluted conditions. The posters Crista and I put together using the school data, my particles per breath calculation, and her eye for visual display are below. The dots show how many particles per breath and the imagery is from the students at the school to remind everyone why we should care about this stuff.

keeping-watch-sample So I applied our Keeping Watch on Air methods/thinking to the air quality data from today. Here’s what I found.

2016-11-16-09local-charmeckaq This morning, Charlotte/Mecklenburg was in Code Red air quality, which is an unusually high value of AQI that we have not experienced in the last five years at least (thankfully!). Our AQI was 158 this morning from Garinger High School, which is managed by our county air quality office so they can report official numbers to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and they can check our county against the national standards for pollution that have been established by science. The 158 AQI is determined from the average PM2.5 over the past 24 hours. Within that 24 hour period, there was a morning peak of AQI of 188 when I looked at the NC Division of Air Quality data. When I convert the 158 AQI to particles per breath via the methods I used for Keeping Watch on Air, then I found that we were breathing about 1000 particles per breath over the past 24 hours. The background “typical” PM2.5 concentration in Mecklenburg is much lower – around 100-200 particles per breath. So the air we were breathing today had about 10 times as many particles in every breath we took! And it was even higher – around 1700 particles per breath – during the peak of the pollution.

For comparison, I tweeted about how our air quality compared with the super-polluted megacity of Beijing, which is home to more than 10 million people. Our State Department USA embassy in Beijing has a high-quality air monitor system there and sends out automated tweets https://twitter.com/BeijingAir which is what i looked at to build a comparison. Their 24 hour avereage PM2.5 from about the same day as Queen City’s air pollution showed PM2.5 AQI of 180, which I translated into about 1500 particles per breath. Essentially, for this kind of quick “back of the envelope” type of calculation, our air quality and Beijing’s air quality were about the same. Said another way, if you felt discomfort or worse in today’s air quality, imagine living in Beijing or another mega-city without the policies that regulate pollution for us to actually have clean air.

2016-11-16-comparison-name Bottom line, for much of the day we were breathing more than 10 times as many particles in every breath than usual. This is like a semi-typical day in Beijing where 50% of the days have AQI greater than 169 according to this peer-reviewed analysis by atmospheric chemists. I am working with staff at Clean Air Carolina and at least one UNC Charlotte student (Calvin Cupini) on analyzing data we collected around this pollution event, but results are TBD. It’s rare to have super high air pollution here, so as scientists we try to learn about what this means. As a fellow citizen of Mecklenburg, I do worry about what even a few days of high pollution means for all of our neighbors, and especially kids. For now, try to enjoy more colorful sunsets while the Queen City is impacted by all the smoky gunk in the atmosphere, and breathe deep when this pollution event subsides.

Tags: aerosols air quality PM2.5 Pollution

Pyrogeography at the AAG Conference

April 17, 2015 by Brian Magi

Another major conference is on the horizon – the Association of American Geographers (AAG) meeting which is in Chicago this year. Check #AAG15. Conferences are absolutely critical for multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary research, and I think for just about all research. Science, like many (most?) other professional enterprises, requires discussion. My first AAG was last year in Tampa, and that was a great experience. The atmosphere at the Tampa conference was informal, yet had the intensity associated with presenting a range of results from preliminary to pretty polished to peer-reviewed and published results. I also liked the thematic message from AAG 2014: Research about climate change past, present, and future will benefit from geographical thinking.

Annual firecounts from the NASA MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite. Nearly 2 million fires happen every year!

Geographical thinking, to me, implies a consideration of human-environmental interactions across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Atmospheric sciences, which is my “home” discipline, tends to focus on atmospheric interactions across time and space scales. Fire research has to consider human-climate-fire interactions, and while I tend toward the climate-fire side since it’s closer to my home discipline, I keep hoping to see some new patterns that capture some regularity in human behavior in the world of large-scale global fire activity. Fire is important in understanding past and future carbon cycle dynamics, but also seems to be symbolic of the human impact on our planet. Are humans driving fire? Are they agents that change fire regimes and then in turn respond to the changing regime? Or is climate exerting a longer time scale control on fire activity that is above and beyond human control? Many interesting questions emerge from questions about fire drivers at seemingly every spatiotemporal scale, and throughout disciplines that could be aligned with geography.

AAG 2015 will include a full day talks about fire on our planet, or pyrogeography. I think pyrogeography is a great term that encapsulates my research. So Earth Day 2015 for me will be at the AAG Pyrogeography Session. I worked with several different types of researchers studying pyrogeography to bring data, modeling, and cultural expertise together for what is now 25 talks on Wednesday April 22. 8am to 7pm.

Pyrogeography Sessions at AAG
8:00 AM – 9:40 AM 2101 Pyrogeography I: Fire Histories 1
10:00 AM – 11:40 AM 2201 Pyrogeography II: Fire Histories 2
11:40 AM – 1:20 PM Lunch
1:20 PM – 3:00 PM 2401 Pyrogeography III: Fire Drivers
3:20 PM – 5:00 PM 2501 Pyrogeography IV: Fire Case Studies
5:20 PM – 7:00 PM 2601 Pyrogeography V: West African Fires

My talk will focus on how global fire modeling – a framework to simulate the biogeophysical processes driving fire activity – contributes to the discussion, and how it can advance the discussion so that we can better test hypotheses about human-climate-fire interactions. I’ve been closely reviewing some recent (peer-reviewed, published) work by scientists working on fire modeling to prepare for my talk. One of my current favorite visualizations of how human activities introduce big challenges in fire modeling is from a paper by Pfeiffer, Spessa, and Kaplan that shows that the biggest discrepancies between complex fire modeling and satellite data (like above) are in parts of the world most impacted by humans.

Lighter colors indicate that regions with larger discrepancies from observations are in areas impacted most by humans.

My colleague, Sam Rabin, will present work we’ve been finalizing over the last 3 months to better understand how satellite data can be used to unpack fire signals into component parts such as cropland and pasture fires. Our research has a lot of interesting implications about how widespread/important pasture fires might be. Not coincidentally, pasture and cropland maps like the one below from our 2012 paper, show that human impact and cultivated land are similar. There is 148 million square kilometers of land on Earth, 100 million square kilometers is vegetated, and 50 million square kilometers is cultivated! HALF of all arable land is cultivated! By inference, we need to know more about pasture and cropland fire practices.

Distribution of agriculture, cropland, and pasture.

Tags: AAG climate-fire interactions fire global environmental change human-fire interactions interdisciplinary research pyrogeography

Climate change and debate

January 15, 2015 by Brian Magi

An interesting article about the amazing climate change humans are causing was published by the UNC Charlotte campus newspaper back in Spring 2014, but it’s worth re-visiting as our atmosphere once again reached 400 ppm CO2 concentration. The piece was published as a point-counterpoint discussion, but as many scientists (include myself) point out, science is not about considering all sides – it’s about considering what the evidence suggests. I wrote a letter in response to the viewpoint that climate change is no big deal. If the evidence from multiple experiments/studies suggests a single point is true, then that’s where the scientific community will tend towards when explaining that science. As the evidence builds and builds with no one finding counter-evidence, the conclusions become more and more robust*. If the evidence suggests mixed or nuanced results, then scientists will talk about that science as inconclusive and continue to try to design better experiments or get more data or both. Most importantly, perhaps, if counter-evidence arises repeatedly, scientific conclusions will change in response. Science is a beautiful, self-correcting process.

In Spring 2014, I sat down with a Niner Times reporter and Twitter friend Ed Averette and talked with him about how I see climate science, and how I talk about the science of climate change in my classroom (most prominently in ESCI 3101, Global Environmental Change). I had a lot to say, mostly because I had just returned from a wonderful conference called the Carolinas Climate Resilience Conference in April 2014, where I talked about Climate Change in the University Classroom (presentation here!), and I met some amazing outreach-oriented people (Kirstin Dow, Greg Carbone, Jim Gandy), and learned a climate change song that could be played on a dulcimer sung by this NPS Ranger. The article Averette wrote is available online and includes a figure I made for my class lectures.

The amazing correlation between Earth’s temperature and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, as derived from multiple ice core datasets shown in the graph itself.

Another Niner Times reporter, Louis Aiello, provided the (journalistic) opposing viewpoint that there is no need to panic when it comes to the present-day climate change and his article is available online as well. Both articles are worth reading since they echo the innate concern we have for our planet, but that at the same time, the problem can feel overwhelmingly large**. Aiello never spoke with me, or as far as I could tell, any expert in the field of climate science, so of course I agree more with the approach Averette used, and found myself strongly disagreeing with Aiello’s article. I wrote a letter to the Niner Times in response to Aiello’s article, and I wrote a shorter version of that letter as well for the print newspaper. I did this because I often think about this artificial public debate that exists in the face of a broad scientific consensus about many points regarding the present-day climate change, and I also think that scientists need to speak up when they know about a topic.

Screenshot of the print version of my letter that had a limited number of words I could include. Hence the online letter is longer.

*Gravity is a good example. Go measure the acceleration if you want, but you’re likely to find the same thing any scientist will find. Acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 meters per second every second that an object falls. Thus, this is essentially a fact in our world, but it arose from evidence, not our gut feeling.

**This philosophy of how a single person drawing from a common resource scales up to major problems is known as the Tragedy of the Commons, which has been spoken about eloquently by many many people, including wikipedia.

Tags: climate global environmental change global warming teaching

Attending AMS 2015 in Phoenix

December 31, 2014 by Brian Magi

MESAS students Warren Pettee and Thomas Winesett and I will be attending AMS 2015 (#AMS2015), along with many others from UNC Charlotte. I heard the count was about 8 undergraduate students from the Meteorology Program. Professor Casey Davenport and I will be the faculty representation at AMS – she and I make up 50% of our Meteorology faculty! Dr Davenport and I are also going to be a the AMS Career Fair with a big green UNC Charlotte table. We’ll be talking to anyone interested in learning more about the graduate and undergraduate programs in Atmospheric Sciences, Geology, Earth Sciences, and Geography at UNC Charlotte. Should be fun! Especially if we put out Andes mints.

For presentations, check my publications page for PDFs of the posters, but here is the summary with some images.

Thomas is presenting his poster twice, once at the AMS 14th Student Conference, and once at the AMS 7th Conference on the Meteorological Applications of Lightning Data (MALD) on Monday.

Thomas’s AMS 2015 poster (co-authors are myself and Dr Dan Cecil, NASA MSFC)

Warren is presenting research about his version of WRF and how it performs for the February 2014 Snow Event in Charlotte at the Student Conference.

Warren’s AMS 2015 poster (co-authors are myself and Professor Matt Eastin)

I am presenting my paper, recently accepted for publication in JTECH, at the 20th Conference on Satellite Meteorology and Oceanography on Monday.

My AMS 2015 poster for the 20th SatMet conference. Based on a paper that will be published at JTECH

Tags: AMS GES lightning research student research undergraduate research

Funded graduate research assistant for fire modeling project

November 07, 2014 by Brian Magi

This is an advertisement I am circulating around to listserves and colleagues to recruit a graduate student (Masters or PhD) into my recently-funded NSF research project. The grant title is “Collaborative Research: Testing Hypotheses About Fire Using Data Syntheses and Fire Modeling” and I am working with researchers at Yale University (Dr Jenn Marlon) and University of Oregon (Dr Bart Bartein) to better understand questions related to the intersection of global fire modeling and paleofire data. The NSF public project summary is here. The recruiting ad is below. Please consider applying! Email if you have questions, or I’d be happy to meet with you at SEDAAG (Athens, GA), AMS (Phoenix, AZ), or AAG (Chicago, IL). Thanks!

Dr. Brian Magi is seeking a graduate student to join the Multidisciplinary Earth System and Atmospheric Sciences (MESAS) research group in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (mesas.uncc.edu). The student will develop research within the context of an NSF funded project focused on studying how global fire modeling can use past and present data to investigate the interactions between fire, climate, and land-use change over a range of time scales. Students will join a multi-institution research team and will engage with an international effort to improve our ability to understand and model fire in the Earth system.

Applicants may apply as a Masters student, or, if they hold an MS degree, as a PhD student. Regardless, applicants should have at least one degree in atmospheric sciences, geography, earth system science, or related field in the physical sciences. The ideal candidate will have a strong quantitative background and computer programming experience, as well as interest in interdisciplinary topics related to climate-human dimensions of global fire activity.

The funded position is available for 2 years, includes tuition, and starts in August 2015. To apply, please email Dr. Brian Magi (brian dot magi at uncc dot edu) a cover letter describing your research interests, goals, and relevant experience, a CV, unofficial college transcripts, GRE scores, and contact information for three references. Questions should be sent to the same email address.

Review of applications will begin immediately and the position will remain open until a suitable candidate is found. After the selection, the successful candidate will apply to be admitted to appropriate UNC Charlotte graduate program; detailed information about the application procedure to the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences is available online (geoearth.uncc.edu).

Tags: fire human-fire interactions Prospective Students pyrogeography student research

Call for Abstracts for Pyrogeography session at AAG 2015

October 22, 2014 by Brian Magi

This is a post that I will link via twitter. If you are interested in presenting your Pyrogeography research at the Association of American Geographers 2015 annual meeting in Chicago in late April 2015, please submit an Abstract and send your AAG PIN to me or another session organizer. AAG Abstract deadline is November 5.

Our other Pyrogeography session co-organizers include Paul Laris (CSU Long Beach), Jenn Marlon (Yale Univ), Michael Coughlan (Univ of Georgia Athens), and Leif Brottem (Grinnell College).

—————-

Call for Abstracts AAG 2015

Title: Pyrogeography

Description: Pyrogeography seeks to understand the spatio-temporal patterns of fire as a function of the complex interplay of human and environmental factors. Over the past century, there have been enormous changes in human perceptions and uses of fire around the world. Moreover, climate and fuel conditions have been rapidly changing in recent decades, further altering interactions between fire and its various controls. Fire researchers are increasingly seeking ways to integrate multiple perspectives and sources of data and information to better understand the changing dimensions of fire regimes, whether expressed through shifts in extent of area burned, fire frequency, type, severity, or seasonality. All methodological approaches are welcome and we especially welcome mixed-method research approaches. Research approaches may span local to global scales, and include diverse approaches from geography and anthropology, based on paleoecological, dendrochronological, archaeological, historical, satellite, mixed-methods, and other modern approaches, as well as global and regional fire modeling research, and fusions of these methods.

Session co-organizers include: Paul Laris [Paul.Laris at csulb.edu], Brian Magi [brian.magi at uncc.edu], Jennifer Marlon [jennmarlon at gmail.com], Michael Coughlan [coughlan at uga.edu], and Leif Brottem [brotteml at grinnell.edu]. Contact any of the co-organizers if you are interested in participating or have questions.

——————

Fires in January 2014 from NASA Rapid Response

Fires in September 2014 from NASA Rapid Response

Fire images are from NASA Rapid Response.

Tags: fire human-fire interactions interdisciplinary research pyrogeography

Beijing air quality and agricultural fires

June 28, 2013 by Brian Magi

As I browsed through my favorite twitter feeds which includes @BeijingAir and the other US Embassies, I saw there was some really really poor air quality in Beijing. The US Embassies in China tweet particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) concentrations in the atmosphere on an hourly basis and also provide 24 hour average PM2.5 per the (USA) EPA regulatory methods. Namely, 24 hour PM2.5 is what’s regulated by the EPA in our country, and since US Embassies are US territory (as I understand it from The Simpsons Bart vs Australia episode), then US-relevant metrics are tweeted in addition to the hourly data. I tweeted about the very poor air quality in Beijing today

#BeijingAir 6-28-13 19:00 1hour PM2.5 is 466 ug/m3!! On #EPA AQI scale, that is 477 or "Hazardous" for a 24 hr exposure. that is really bad.

— Brian Magi (@brianmagi) June 28, 2013

and

Holy cow. 24 hour PM2.5 #BeijingAir is 294.5 ug/m3 or 345 AQI or Hazardous! 500 AQI is as bad as #EPA goes. Please cease all breathing now.

— Brian Magi (@brianmagi) June 28, 2013

The second tweet was an tribute to an Onion article saying something like EPA tells people to stop breathing but I couldn’t find a link. Ok. So after I sent out that 2nd tweet, I began to wonder: What the heck is going on in Beijing? PM2.5 is above 400 ug/m3* for hours on end during the day and the 24 hour average PM2.5 just got tweeted as nearly 300 ug/m3. This is extremely hazardous, both on the EPA scale of Air Quality Index (AQI) and on the scale of I-Cannot-Breathe-Long-Enough-To-Finish-This-Sente… (no link to that scale). As the title of the post implies, the answer is related to burning practices – and I think it’s worth more that a couple of tweets. I’m asserting that the main problem is emissions from local/regional agricultural fires. This touches on my own research into fires and the peculiar human-influenced fire seasonality as a function of where you are in the world. Now, take it easy, I tell myself. Why? Every scientist loves to talk about science, but we especially love talking about our own research. I’ll try not to go on and on, is what I’m saying.

How can we do a first-order (read as “informal”) test of this hypothesis? First, let’s check satellites. There is some very accessible information from NASA that can be used to study problems that aren’t in the data-rich part of the world or in the parts of the world where I don’t even know what the characters are for “fire”. NASA has a satellite called Terra reporting data since November 2000. From this page, I googled the lat-lon of Beijing (40 N, 116 E) and created my own custom satellite image of Eastern China with the approximate location of Beijing marked.

Satellite image from MODIS sensor on the NASA Terra satellite for June 28 2013. Beijing location is approximate.

Right away, you see there are clouds. But there are also signs of gray-ish haze very similar to my research page header up at the top (smoke pouring off of southern Africa). So smoke is a distinct possibility. Now we can use data from the same NASA satellite (Terra) and same sensor (MODIS) but using a different wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. Namely, the parts that we feel/sense as heat – or thermal infrared radiation. Turns out, NASA has a whole team of scientists looking at this data and there is a data product called the Thermal Anomaly product. Something more “operational” (meaning it’s available at a semi-regular and rapidly updated way, like weather data is for weather forecasting models) for global fires is available at the same NASA website as I used to get the image above. Here’s the global view of fires

Global fire activity from the last 10 days ending on June 28 2013.

Clearly, fires are active in Eastern China – so we’re almost at the bottom of the mystery of why @BeijingAir is not the place for breathing deeply right now. You can download a map file showing fires from the last 48 hours for different regions by going to the KML tab and opening the KML file in Google Earth. I downloaded the “Russia and Asia” KML file and produced this

Active fires from the MODIS sensor on the NASA Terra for the 48 hours ending on June 28 2013.

where you can see that my Google Earth has the Beijing Embassy location saved as a placemark. Regardless of the clouds, the pollution from the fires is certainly pouring into the atmosphere over Beijing and affecting surface air quality to the point that the AQI values are nearly off the scale again, but this time, it is not because of the combination of meteorology and emissions from fossil fuel consumption.

The winter and spring months – the months related to the very poor air quality referred to in the report above and here – are plagued by deep near surface temperature inversions that act to inhibit mixing. What does this mean? Well, if pollution is emitted from cars and factories in Beijing in the winter-spring, it will tend to stay in the first 500 meters (1800 ft) above the ground – roughly. The pollution gets trapped. On a day without a temperature inversion, the pollutants emitted are probably about the same, but mix into a much deeper atmosphere (say about 2000-3000 meters, or about 4-6 times deeper layer). The pollution is thus more dilute. I haven’t checked meteorology in the case of todays very poor air quality, but I suspect the effect of meteorology (even if mixing is deep and efficient) is overwhelmed by the emissions from all the fires southeast of Beijing.

What kind of fires? Or why are they burning? Great question! Are these forest fires like the lightning-triggered fires plaguing the Western USA right now? No! When you mask out the Terra MODIS fire data in a way that you only look at data from land that is mostly cropland (agriculture) in Eastern China, then you find something related to our findings in the Biogeosciences paper.

Fire season for land that is mostly agriculture (cropland in Eastern China) and land that is mostly non-agriculture (forests, grasslands). This is based on the average over 10 years of data from MODIS. The region considered is roughly Mongolia and China. Other parts of the world look much different – more analysis like this in the link to my paper below.

The figure above shows that while the land with a low fraction of cropland (less than 20%) tends to burn in July-August, the land with a high fraction of cropland (greater than 80%) tends to burn in (you guessed it) June-July. As the caption states, these “average” seasonalities are based on over 10 years of Terra MODIS fire observations. When you average 10+ years of Junes for the low and high fraction of cropland, you get the data point in month six for blue and green curves above. In other words, the fires are right on schedule, Eastern China! Hopefully for the citizens of Beijing, the burning will be short-lived and meteorology will transport the smoke away and dilute it down with clean air in the process.

All that being said, a full scientific analysis of the air quality requires much more than this post offers. Sensitivity, ground-based analysis, meteorological analysis, and actual counting of the fires among other things would be required to prove with a much higher degree of confidence that my hypothesis does not fail, but usually scientists make hypotheses because they observe an event/phenomenon that is consistent or inconsistent within some sort of framework. In this case, what I saw in China air quality was inconsistent with what I understood about the meteorology there (for this time of year) and consistent with the work I did with colleagues regarding fire seasonality.

*The unit of concentration for PM2.5 is micrograms per cubic meter which is often written as ug/m3 even though the “u” should be the Greek letter “mu” which itself means “micro” which is one millionth and “m3” should be “m” with a superscript “3” to indicate “cubed”)

Tags: air quality data analysis data visualization fire fire seasonality NASA publications twitter

Interactive USA wildfire map from Climate Central

June 25, 2013 by Brian Magi

Amazing what a team of scientists, techs, and a pile of data will bring you. I tried to embed a great map interface by the group at Climate Central here, but it didn’t work so here’s a screenshot of the information the interactive map provides when you zoom into one of the large fires affecting the USA right now (this one near Los Alamos, New Mexico). climatecentral-firemap Go to their widget here or to the more detailed posting about the widget here. Essentially, Climate Central is posting updated USA (or maybe North America) fire locations with really useful (and frightening) details as they roll in from daily reports by fire and land managers. Respect and praise for this great product of the intersection between science, technology, and public outreach. I wish the fire crews the best as they battle against an unforgiving enemy.

Tags: fire global environmental change human-fire interactions lightning USA

Charlotte Research Scholars 2013

February 13, 2013 by Brian Magi

Cross-posted from a campus-wide announcement. I participated as a CRS mentor in Summer 2012 and have volunteered to participate again this summer. Please let me know if you’re interested in working on a project – this is a great chance to get paid to do research and learn valuable skills. Apply now – it’s not a committment and it’s certainly NOT a guarantee that you’ll even get the funding. 60 applicants will be selected from a pool that I would guess would be about 200 students. Maybe more. Application is here and is due by 5:00 pm on Feb 25.

……………….START ANNOUNCEMENT……………………….

Attention rising seniors, you can now apply for the 2013 Charlotte Research Scholars summer program.

The Charlotte Research Scholars (CRS) program is sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs, Graduate School, and Charlotte Research Institute. It will provide 60 UNC Charlotte undergraduate students funding to participate in a 10-week research program. Scholars receive one-on-one, faculty-guided research training, and participate in weekly professional development sessions to better prepare them for graduate school and a future research career. The program culminates in the Summer Research Symposium, held on August 1st in the Student Union. Additional details are below.

Application deadline: 5:00 pm on February 25, 2013
Program length: May 28 to August 3 (10 weeks)
Eligibility: Undergraduates with a minimum GPA of 2.8 and between 50 and 110 credit hours by spring 2013
Compensation: Scholars will receive a $4,000 fellowship
Application: Apply here

Frequently Asked Questions:
How much time are scholars expected to commit to their research project?
Scholars are expected to work full-time for the entire 10-weeks. They will spend approximately 3-4 hrs/week away from the project in order to participate in professional development activities.
How will the scholars be selected?
The CRS steering committee will attempt to match the most qualified students with research projects that are of interest to them. To facilitate this matching, students will include a ranking of their preferred project choices in their application. If a match is identified, the faculty member will be contacted to see if there is interest in the applicant. In addition, feel free to indicate any preferences for particular students that you might have in the text of your email (not the submission form).
Whom do I contact if I have additional questions?
Dennis Livesay, Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics (drlivesa@uncc.edu).

Tags: CRS undergraduate research

Science meeting in Austin Texas

December 18, 2012 by Brian Magi

If you’re an undergraduate in physics, math, or a related field, and thinking about graduate school options, my colleague Professor Manda Adams and I will be in Austin, Texas from January 5-11 2013 for the American Meteorological Society Student Conference and for the full professional conference. Send me an email if you want to meet up and talk about grad school at UNC Charlotte! Also, I will be presenting some of my research in global fire modeling on Thursday from 9:30-9:45am in this session. My presentation will be about the role that satellite-based lightning data plays in global fire modeling.

Tags: AMS interdisciplinary research student research

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**This philosophy of how a single person drawing from a common resource scales up to major problems is known as the Tragedy of the Commons, which has been spoken about eloquently by many many people, including wikipedia.

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Call for Abstracts AAG 2015

Title: Pyrogeography

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*The unit of concentration for PM2.5 is micrograms per cubic meter which is often written as ug/m3 even though the “u” should be the Greek letter “mu” which itself means “micro” which is one millionth and “m3” should be “m” with a superscript “3” to indicate “cubed”)

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