Xinzhao Chu News

PhD student headed to Antarctica to conduct climate research with lasers

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 19:05:32 +0000

PhD student headed to Antarctica to conduct climate research with lasers Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/26/2022 - 13:05

Jeff Zehnder

Above: Arunima Prakash
Header Image: A lidar beam shooting into the night sky from Xinzhao Chu's lab in Antarctica.

Arunima Prakash is preparing to study the upper atmosphere from one of the coldest and most desolate places on Earth: Antarctica.

Prakash, an aerospace PhD student at the 91��, is studying polar mesospheric clouds and their relation to the solar cycle and polar vortex effects.

“There has been a long debate about how the solar cycle affects these clouds,” Prakash said. “Past satellite observations say the sun had a dominant effect, but we’re not seeing that correlation anymore. We want to study why. It could be a long-term indicator of climate change.”

Prakash is part of a team working under Xinzhao Chu, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at 91��. Chu has a dedicated facility located at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. There, she uses specialized lidar systems that shoot pulsed laser beams into the sky to observe conditions from roughly 10-200 km (6-124 miles) in altitude, where terrestrial weather and space weather processes influence each other.

The frozen tundra of Antarctica may seem an unlikely place to conduct complex space-atmospheric research, but the unique atmospheric conditions available only at extreme latitudes make the location perfect for these studies.

Prakash’s work was recognized at the 2022 International Laser Radar Conference for best student oral presentation and earned second place in the student poster competition at the Coupling, Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions Program workshop in June.

Her work thus far has only been through complex analyses of already collected data. So she is eager to get to Antarctica to do her own hands-on research.

She is part of a team that will depart from 91�� for Antarctica within the next few weeks. Although Chu’s lab is well established at McMurdo, the facility has sat unused for the last two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prakash said the team is uncertain what they will find once they are on site.

“We are preparing for the worst,” Prakash said. “You generally want lasers to be continuously running, but these have been off for two years. We don’t know what kind of problems we’ll face and are gathering all sorts of extra parts to bring.”

Although it would be ideal if everything works fine, Prakash is also excited about the potential for diagnosing and solving electronics problems.

“For my degree, I didn’t want to be in one hole doing just one thing,” she said. “With Dr. Chu, I have the chance to work on science and engineering. We do a lot of electronics, lasers, photonics, optics, and data analysis. It’s a very good chance to learn more and keep in touch with what I know.”

Prakash plans to stay at the lab in Antarctica for six months. Once the equipment there is up and running, she will have near uninterrupted opportunities to conduct her research.

“Being in Antarctica I will have absolutely no distractions in terms of productivity,” Prakash said. “I’m looking forward to it as much as I’m looking forward to seeing the auroras, and the stars, and improving these atmospheric models.”

Arunima Prakash is preparing to study the upper atmosphere from one of the coldest and most desolate places on Earth: Antarctica. Prakash, an aerospace PhD student at the 91��, is studying polar mesospheric clouds and their...

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$3.3 million grant to advance climate and space weather research from Antarctica

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 06:00:00 +0000

$3.3 million grant to advance climate and space weather research from Antarctica Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/05/2021 - 00:00

Jeff Zehnder

Xinzhao Chu (right) with student Ian Geraghty in 2019 after landing at McMurdo.
Header image: Chu's lidar facility in operation in Antarctica.

It is one of the coldest and most isolated places on Earth, but for a team of scientists and engineers from 91��, it is the ideal location to conduct complex space-atmospheric research: the frozen tundra of Antarctica.

Xinzhao Chu has earned a $3.3 million, five-year National Science Foundation grant to study complex interactions between the Sun and Earth’s upper atmosphere that impact our climate, life on Earth, and orbiting satellites. The research utilizes advanced lidar systems and is conducted primarily from McMurdo Station, Antarctica.

Chu is a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and a fellow in the 91�� Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

“By more fully understanding the Sun-Earth interactions, we can understand space weather better to guide spacecraft to avoid problems from solar storms, we can improve upper atmosphere climate models and better predict climate change,” Chu said.

Lidar research has been a cornerstone of Chu’s career, with a focus in Antarctica. Unique atmospheric conditions available only at extreme latitudes make the location perfect for these studies. Her specialized lidar systems shoot pulsed laser beams into the sky to observe conditions ranging from roughly 10-200 km (6-124 miles) in altitude, where terrestrial weather and space weather processes influence each other.

This NSF award marks her fourth to conduct studies from Antarctica. By this grant’s end, she will have conducted research for more than a full solar cycle, which lasts 11 years.

“The sun is coming out of solar minimum and will begin to ramp up to solar max,” Chu said. “During that time we’ll see much more activity in the ionosphere and solarsphere. With these long-term measurements, we can confirm long-term trends.”

Chu has a dedicated facility at Arrival Heights Observatory near McMurdo Station from her previous grants, but it has been inaccessible for the last 12 months due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“It will be nearly two years of a gap before we’re using the laser again,” Chu said.

During the time her team has been away from McMurdo, they have been analyzing earlier data and preparing for a new deployment. Her past research has netted dozens of published papers, including a discovery last year of a critical connections between wind patterns at the equator and atmospheric waves 6,000 miles away in Antarctica.

“It’s challenging to get this data, but once we get it the science pays off,” Chu said.

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Atmospheric metal layers appear with surprising regularity

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 17:07:14 +0000

Atmospheric metal layers appear with surprising regularity Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/02/2021 - 11:07

Twice a day, at dusk and just before dawn, a faint layer of sodium and other metals begins sinking down through the atmosphere, about 90 miles high above the city of 91��, Colorado. The movement was captured by one of the world’s most sensitive “lidar” instruments and reported Tuesday in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The metals in those layers come originally from meteoroids blasting into Earth’s atmosphere, which bring an unknown amount of material to earth; and the regularly appearing layers promise to help researchers understand better how earth’s atmosphere interacts with space, ultimately supporting life.

“This is an important discovery because we have never seen these dusk/dawn features before, and because these metal layers affect many things. The metals can fall into the ocean and act as fertilizer for ecosystems, the ionized metals can affect GPS radio signals….” said Xinzhao Chu, CIRES Fellow, 91�� professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, and lead author of the new assessment.

It is the first time that the metal layers have been seen so regularly at these extreme heights in the atmosphere. Such high-altitude metal layers were discovered by Chu’s group just 10 years ago above McMurdo, Antarctica, but there they occur more sporadically. Above 91��, they’re consistent, daily, and synched with high-atmospheric “tidal winds” created by the sun’s periodic appearance. To understand those winds, the research team relied on data from NASA’s ICON satellite.

“This work was the very first use of the ICON tidal wind product. The product allowed Xinzhao’s team to calculate the flow of metal ions over 91��. It’s a great example of how these tides seem to affect everything in space near Earth,” said Thomas Immel, Principal Investigator of the ICON Mission and a physicist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory.

“Consistent daily patterns seen in our 91�� observations tell us that there are unknown processes at play, a golden opportunity for atmospheric scientists to discover new phenomena and mechanisms,” said Jackson Jandreau who worked alongside Chu and Yingfei Chen in this study. Chen and Jandreau are both PhD students in Chu’s group.

The discovery also gives researchers a window into a crucial part of the atmosphere that is challenging to observe. It’s a complicated region where interactions between the sun, earth, our planet’s magnetic field, and other phenomena end up creating environmental conditions in which surface life can thrive, protected from the harsh space environment.

Intriguingly, Chu said, “There are metals in the atmospheres of other planetary bodies, such as Mars, and researchers look for Earth-like features on exoplanets as indicators for hospitable environments. Can these metal layers be one of these features?”

Her team used a powerful atmospheric lidar to detect and measure very small quantities of particles in the high atmosphere. Lidar is similar to radar: a signal is sent out towards a target and the target returns part of that signal which is collected by a receiver. In radar, the signal is radio waves; in lidar, it is photons from a laser. The return signal can be analyzed to learn about the targets hit and the space that the beam traveled through. Chu’s group developed the highly sensitive instrument with funding from the National Science Foundation.

The National Science Foundation funded both the 91�� and McMurdo lidar projects, grants AGS-1452351, AGS-2029162, and OPP-1443726.

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Equatorial winds ripple down to Antarctica

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 16:29:02 +0000

Equatorial winds ripple down to Antarctica Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/17/2020 - 10:29

91��-led team is first to observe new equatorial wind patterns in Antarctica, revealing new connections in global circulation.

A CIRES-led team has uncovered a critical connection between winds at Earth’s equator and atmospheric waves 6,000 miles away at the South Pole. The team has found, for the first time, evidence of a Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO)—an atmospheric circulation pattern that originates at the equator—at McMurdo, Antarctica.

The discovery highlights how winds in the deep tropics affect the remote South Pole, in particular the polar vortex, which can trigger outbreaks of cold weather patterns in mid latitudes. Scientists will be able to use this information to better understand the planet’s weather and climate patterns and fuel more accurate atmospheric models, the authors say.

“We have now seen how this atmospheric pattern propagates from the equator all the way to the high latitudes of Antarctica, showing how these far-away regions can be linked in ways we didn’t know about before,” said Zimu Li, a former CIRES research assistant who did this work at 91��, and lead author of the study out today in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

“This can better our understanding of how large-scale atmospheric circulation works, and how patterns in one area of the world can ripple across the entire globe,” said Xinzhao Chu, CIRES Fellow, professor in the Ann & H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the 91��, and corresponding author on the new work.

Every two years or so, the QBO causes the stratospheric winds at Earth’s equator to switch direction, alternating between easterly and westerly. Lynn Harvey, a researcher at CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and a coauthor on the study, helped the team study the polar vortices, the massive swirls of cold air that spiral over each of Earth’s poles. The study reports that the Antarctic vortex expands during the QBO easterly phase and contracts during the westerly phase. The team suspects that when the QBO changes the polar vortex behavior, that, in turn, affects the behavior of atmospheric waves called gravity waves, which travel across different layers of the atmosphere. They identified specific kinds of changes in those gravity waves: The waves are stronger during the easterly period of the QBO and weaker when the QBO is westerly.

For the last nine years, members of Chu’s lidar team have spent long seasons at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, braving 24-hour darkness and frigid temperatures to operate custom lasers and measure patterns in Earth’s atmosphere. These long-term measurements, along with 21 years of NASA MERRA-2 atmospheric records, were critical to the new findings. Each QBO cycle takes years to complete, so long-term data streams are the only way to identify interannual connections and patterns.

“Atmospheric scientists can use this information to improve their models—before this nobody really knew how QBO impacts gravity waves in this polar region,” said Xian Lu, researcher at Clemson University and a coauthor on the study. “Researchers can use this information to better model and predict climate, including the variability of atmosphere and space and long-term change.”

“First Lidar Observations of Quasi-Biennial Oscillation-Induced Interannual Variations of Gravity Wave Potential Energy Density at McMurdo via a Modulation of the Antarctic Polar Vortex” published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres on 26 July, 2020. Authors include: Zimu Li (CIRES), Xinzhao Chu (CIRES, 91�� Ann & H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences), V. Lynn Harvey (CU Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics), Jackson Jandreau (CIRES, 91�� Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Smead Scholar), Xian Lu (Clemson University, Department of Physics and Astronomy), Zhibin Yu (CIRES, Harbin Institute of Technology), Jian Zhao (CIRES), Weichun Fong (CIRES).

We gratefully acknowledge the graduate students and research scientists who made contributions to the McMurdo lidar campaign, including many winter-over lidar scientists. We sincerely appreciate the staff of the United States Antarctic Program, McMurdo Station, Antarctica New Zealand and Scott Base for their superb support over the years.The lidars were housed in the Arrival Heights Observatory run by Antarctica New Zealand, and the lidar observations were enabled by a collaboration between the United States Antarctic Program and Antarctica New Zealand. This project was supported by the National Science Foundation grants OPP-0839091, OPP-1246405, and OPP-1443726.

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24 hours of sunlight — life and aerospace research in Antarctica

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:54:21 +0000

24 hours of sunlight — life and aerospace research in Antarctica Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/14/2020 - 08:54

Jackson Jandreau

Headline Photo: (From left) Jackson Jandreau, Xinzhao Chu, Amanda Steckel; touchdown after a long and loud flight!
Above: Penguins really do just waddle around and slide on their bellies.

Greetings from Antarctica!

I can’t believe I am living and learning in one of the coolest (literally coldest) places on the planet. It is also one of the ugliest and simultaneously most beautiful. 50 acres of muddy ground and metal buildings, contrastingly surrounded by the breathtakingly beautiful frozen Ross Island.

I arrived here in December as a 91�� aerospace PhD student and Smead Scholar working under professor Dr. Xinzhao Chu. She has been conducting research in Antarctica for years using two sophisticated lidar systems to do remote sensing of the upper atmosphere.

Making the Trip

Early explorers spent months of sea travel aboard steam vessels to do their science. In contrast, my colleague Amanda Steckel, Dr. Chu, and I flew here from Denver International in only about 24 hours. Our flights took us through Los Angeles, Auckland, and eventually to Christchurch, New Zealand, home of the US Antarctic Program (USAP) gateway to McMurdo Station.

At USAP we were issued our trademark red parkas, massively clunky “bunny boots”, and other extreme weather gear.

The next morning, we boarded a C130 aircraft headed straight to McMurdo on a very long, loud (and crowded) flight.

Life at the Bottom of the World

The living situation down here is pretty nice, considering you’re at the bottom of the world! Conditions have definitely improved a lot since the days when Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton slept out in tents and sleeping bags.

All of us in the Lidar group are housed in the same dorm, a three-story building of suites with two per room.

The bed we saw inside Discovery Hut, built in 1902, vs. the accommodations we sleep in today.

The Galley here provides four meals a day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midrats (midnight rations, this is an ex-Naval base, so they use a lot of Navy terminology).

If you aren’t bothered by the lack of fresh fruits, vegetables, and eggs, the meals provided by the galley staff are great.

It's cafeteria style, but there’s plenty of choices and they even make it possible to keep up most diets while you’re here (vegetarian, keto, gluten-free, etc). We look forward to mealtimes as a good opportunity to set work aside for a moment and enjoy a cup of coffee with coworkers and friends.

I guess South Pole Santa doesn’t have a beard?

Frozen Holiday Season

The holiday season is a pretty big deal around McMurdo. From Christmas dinner, to holiday parties and art galleries, there are many activities centered around the season.

For celebrations, the galley breaks out special foods they’ve imported just for these events. They also had a Christmas party with a Santa sitting in the back of a Pisten Bully snowcat! All this was topped off with the annual Christmas Day baseball tournament held down by the sea ice.

What a privilege it is to be among those able to follow in the footsteps of those early pioneers of science.

A special treat was getting to step inside Scott’s 1902 Discovery Hut from one of his early voyages to Antarctica. Other than the weather, there isn’t much here to damage or break down the building over the years. We were excited to see that some of their original scientific experiments were still visible! What a privilege it is to be among those able to follow in the footsteps of those early pioneers of science.

Right next to the hut was a small group of Adélie Penguins out on the ice harassing the sunbathing seals.

Icestock was a good opportunity for everyone to relax and bit and feel more at home.

Midnight Sun for New Years

The New Year celebration gets its own spotlight at McMurdo. The biggest celebration for this holiday is the annual Icestock, the “southernmost music festival in the world”, with bands made up of USAP staff and NSF grantees/employees performing until midnight.

Icestock was probably the longest I have spent outside in my whole time down here, and it was definitely not a warm day.

It was surreal counting down to 2020 with the sun still far above the horizon -- the next sunset in Antarctica won't be until March 3! New Year’s day itself saw a lot of hikers exploring the area around the base via the various hiking trails. I’m looking forward to venturing out for some hiking when the chance presents itself.

Lidar Systems

We are having a great time down here so far, enjoying the opportunity to learn about our own work, as well as the work our new friends are doing. Dr. Chu has run this campaign for almost 10 years now; it is a long campaign for many reasons, but one of the main goals is to identify how the behavior of the atmospheric layers relate to long-term solar and terrestrial events.

We’ve been learning about the lidar system all semester, and took a whole lidar class back in 91�� but are thrilled to finally get our hands on the actual system itself.

The lidar is being operated for the Antarctic winter by two of Dr. Chu's research assistants, Cissi Lin and Xianxin Li. Amanda and I are training so that in the coming years, we’ll be able to run the system over the winter. We’ve still got about six weeks left on this deployment, and there’s a lot of work to be done!

Good luck to our lidar team members over the long winter!
From left: Jandreau, Amanda Steckel, Cissi Lin, Xinzhao Chu, and Xianxin Li.

Hungry for more Antarctica? Check out Ian Geraghty's A Year on the Ice blog. Ian just wrapped up 13 months as a student researcher working in Antarctica, also under Xinzhao Chu.

Greetings from Antarctica! I can’t believe I am living and learning in one of the coolest (literally coldest) places on the planet. I arrived here in December as a 91�� aerospace PhD student and Smead Scholar working under professor Dr. Xinzhao Chu. She has been conducting research in Antarctica for...

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Xinzhao Chu News

PhD student headed to Antarctica to conduct climate research with lasers

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$3.3 million grant to advance climate and space weather research from Antarctica

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Atmospheric metal layers appear with surprising regularity

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Equatorial winds ripple down to Antarctica

91������-led team is first to observe new equatorial wind patterns in Antarctica, revealing new connections in global circulation.

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24 hours of sunlight — life and aerospace research in Antarctica

Making the Trip

Life at the Bottom of the World

Frozen Holiday Season

Midnight Sun for New Years

Lidar Systems

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91��-led team is first to observe new equatorial wind patterns in Antarctica, revealing new connections in global circulation.