Ankur Desai
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Ankur Desai |
Ankur Desai (ASP postdoctoral fellow in TIIMES) joined NCAR in late August 2006 and has been busy ramping up his research here. Ankur's primary research interests lie in the realm of carbon cycle science and boundary layer meteorology. His PhD work combined intensive observations with novel ecosystem models to advance understanding of the impact of land management and climate on regional exchange of carbon dioxide between forests and the atmosphere. Currently, Ankur is collaborating with scientists at CGD and MMM to improve data assimilation techniques for land-atmosphere flux and atmosphere tracer data. He is also involved with the Carbon in the Mountains Experiment (CME) and is helping plan next year's Airborne Carbon in the Mountains Experiment field campaign (ACME07) focused on quantifying regional carbon exchange in the complex terrain of the Rocky Mountains.
Major activities since joining NCAR:
—Three papers in preparation (2 as first author). Two of these focus on technical aspects of data analysis techniques for inferring long-term carbon flux from eddy covariance towers. The third is a paper comparing top-down tracer based and bottom-up tower based scaling approaches to quantifying regional carbon flux.
— One paper written last summer now accepted for publication
Desai, A.R., Moorcroft, P.R., Bolstad, P.V. and Davis, K.J., 2006. Regional carbon fluxes from a biometrically-constrained dynamic ecosystem model: Impact of disturbance, CO 2 fertilization and heterogeneous land cover. Journal of Geophysical Research - Biogeosciences, accepted.
— One paper in press
Desai, A.R., Noormets, A.N., Bolstad, P.V., Chen, J., Cook, B.D., Davis, K.J., Euskirchen, E.S., Gough, C.M., Martin, J.G., Ricciuto, D.M., Schmid, H.P., Tang, J.W. and Wang, W., 2006. Influence of vegetation and surface forcing on carbon dioxide fluxes across the Upper Midwest, USA: Implications for regional scaling, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, in press.
— Gave invited presentation and led discussion session related to an in prep paper at a workshop at Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany
Desai, A.R., Cook, BD, David, KJ. Towards a robust, generalizable non-linear regression gap filling algorithm (NLR_EM). Gap Filling Workshop 2006, Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany.
— Prepared poster on eddy covariance flux tower scaling to be presented at regional flux meeting in Boulder in October
Desai A.R., Davis KJ, Bolstad PV, Helliker B. Constraining regional CO2 flux with multiple top-down and bottom-up approaches. 2006 Ameriflux Annual Meeting, Boulder, CO.
— Visited CEA-Sacalay in Gif-sur-Yvette, France to discuss potential for research collaboration with renowned carbon cycle experts there
— Initiated research collaboration with Dave Schimel in CGD, Britt Stephens in EOL, and David Moore at CERES to advance understanding of regional scale data assimilation of carbon dioxide flux to improve ability to quantify and predict regional land-atmosphere fluxes of biologically relevant trace gases.
— Continued maintenance and data processing for eddy covariance flux towers in the upper Midwest USA and started process of hiring and training new technicians/students who will take over much of these tasks.
Non-research activities
- Continued discussion with international students about opportunities in graduate school in the atmospheric sciences. I regularly communicate with this pool of students because I am listed as a graduate student alumni contact at the Meteorology Department of my Ph.D. institution, The Pennsylvania State University.
Funding Support
The National Science Foundation through CGD and MMM; DOE and NASA through Pennsylvania State University and University of Minnesota for support of upper Midwest flux towers; and Government of Germany via the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry for workshop travel support.