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Climate change is arguably one of the
most important issues facing our planet.

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And this is a difficult problem because
we don't have a full understanding of

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how much carbon we're producing to
man-made sources or how much is

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occurring from natural sources. And we
also don't know how much is being

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removed through oceanic uptake and
photosynthesis. To solve this we need to

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be able to measure carbon globally and
have a long-term climate record. Both

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NOAA and NASA scientists have been
working on these problems and that's

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where my research comes into play. My
name is Emily Wilson

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I'm the lab chief of the laser remote
sensing lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight

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Center.
I developed miniaturized instruments

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that measure greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere.

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One of these instruments is a
miniaturized laser heterodyne radiometer,

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and we call that the mini-LHR for
short. Our vision is to develop a

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low-cost global network of mini-LHR
instruments to measure greenhouse gases.

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To do this, we've partnered with AERONET. This is a global network of

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about 500 instruments that measure
aerosols in the atmosphere. We've

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designed the mini-LHR to operate in
tandem with the AERONET sun photometer

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so that we can deploy our instrument
into their network. The way the mini-LHR

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works is that sunlight that's passed
through greenhouse gases in the

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atmosphere it's collected with optics
that are connected to the side of a

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AERONET sun tracker. So we mix
sunlight with laser light to produce a

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beat signal. And from this beat signal we
can then calculate the concentration of

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greenhouse gases in the atmospheric
column. On a daily basis I work on

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improvements to the instrument, so I'm
working in the lab. I'm also working on

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proposals and publications. And in
addition, I manage the Laser Remote Sensing

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Lab, which has about 30 people. The most
exciting part of my job is testing an

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instrument in the field. It's a
completely different experience to get

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an instrument working in the lab than it
is in the field, for example on a volcano

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at 11,000 feet. Instrument development is
not like the science that you see

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TV where something big happens all of a
sudden. It's slow, steady progress to

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develop your instrument. You're
troubleshooting, you're trying to figure

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out why things aren't working, you're
improving components. And eventually you

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create a characterized instrument that
you can take to the field and deploy.

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Everybody assumes that NASA is all
space flight, but the reality is that

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here we do a lot of earth science
applications and work on projects to

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protect our planet. Working on the mini-LHR is exciting because we're going to

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produce a low cost instrument that can
contribute to the global effort to

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better understand climate change.

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Music

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