Physics Colloquium Speaker to Discuss Advances in Greenhouse Gas Measurements

Daniel Havey, a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at James Madison University will present an Old Dominion University Department of Physics colloquium on Tuesday, April 17, in which he will discuss his latest research aimed at producing more accurate measurements in the atmosphere of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

Havey's "Impact of Water-Broadening on Atmospheric Remote Sensing of Carbon Dioxide" will be at 3 p.m. in Room 1100 of the Physical Sciences Building II. The colloquium and reception with refreshments, which begins at 2:30 in the same building's Atrium, are free and open to the public.

The guest speaker will be on the ODU campus for most of the day, and faculty members or students who wish to have small-group or personal meetings with him should contact Mark Havey, ODU professor of physics, at mhavey@odu.edu.

This colloquium is co-sponsored by ODU's Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Initiative.

Daniel Havey will explain the basics of atmospheric remote sensing, discuss current needs and challenges in the measurement of carbon dioxide, provide research results and convey the atmospheric implications of those results.

His research group at JMU has been able to quantify how water in the atmosphere can result in water-broadening - a form of distortion - of efforts to measure carbon dioxide. "Neglecting to include our results in retrieval algorithms will result in a complicated spatially and seasonally variable measurement bias," Havey wrote in describing his research findings.