Meet the Scientists

The Arctic is where warming has been strongest over the past century. It is an atmospheric receptor of pollution from the northern midlatitudes continents, as manifested in particular by thick aerosol layers.NASA aircraft will follow the trails of smoke plumes from some of Earth's northernmost forest fires, examining their contribution to Arctic pollution. The NASA crew is keeping Earth Live posted daily.

Andreas Beyersdorf
Andreas is a post-doctoral researcher at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. He is a member of the Langley Aerosol Research Group Experiment (LARGE) on the NASA DC-8. The group has a large amount of instruments on the aircraft (17 to 18 depending on who is doing the counting) that measure the quantity and composition of aerosols in the atmosphere. The main focus of his work during the ARCTAS mission is to measure aerosols emitted from forest fires both in Canada and California. Andreas is originally from El Toro, California, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine in 2007. His graduate research focused on snow photochemical experiments at Summit, Greenland, and in Antarctica. He is excited to once again do research in the Arctic.

Carolyn F. Butler
Born in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (at that time) to an American diplomat father and a French mother, Carolyn grew up on four continents and ended up at Syracuse University. She completed her undergraduate degree in math and parlayed that knowledge into a programming position with a NASA contract company. Carolyn's main focus was to analyze lidar data, and for the next few years she also worked on a Master of Science in Applied Sciences degree at The College of William and Mary. Her combined knowledge became a real asset when the Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) was to be built. Carolyn took on the responsibility to program the data acquisition and real-time display system for this sensor, a Langley Research Center developed system flying on the DC-8 during ARCTAS deployments. She flew on her first field campaign in 1980 and has participated in nearly 30 field missions since. Between missions, Carolyn was married and has raised two children, both of whom are now pursuing their own graduate degrees. She has continued working for the lidar group at Langley Research Center since 1973 and is now with Science Systems and Applications, Inc. When not flying on field missions, Carolyn analyzes the data along with the other "Lidar Ladies." Like many others working in this field, Carolyn says she loves what she does because she learns something new nearly every day.

Mike Fromm
Mike is a meteorologist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. and has been studying stratospheric clouds of various types since 1993. Stratospheric clouds were always thought to have been created either by volcanic injections, or from condensation/freezing in the cold winter months of the polar regions. Ten years ago we discovered smoke in the stratosphere (using an NRL satellite instrument) and eventually "connected the dots" from these observations to what we call pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb for short). PyroCb have many similarities to volcanic eruptions, one of which is the energy to transport smoke and other pollutants several kilometers into the stratosphere, where they have a long lifetime. Surprising to all but the seasoned forest scientists like Brian Stocks, this discovery is one of the many drivers for NASA's ARCTAS campaign. Brian and Mike are a team and are referred to as the ARCTAS "fire guys." They will be monitoring fires from the ground and satellite as well as monitoring fire weather, and the conditions for blowup (smoke plume movement from fires that blow up and inject their emissions high into the atmosphere). Brian and Mike will also provide guidance to flight planners and aircraft as well as collecting data for later analysis.

Terry Lathem
Terry Lathem is a second-year graduate student in the department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He began working with NASA Langley’s aerosol research group as an undergraduate intern during the summer of 2007, where he participated in the TC4 campaign in Costa Rica. He has been responsible for integrating a cloud condensation nuclei counter onto both the DC8 and P3 aircrafts, and will be the primary operator of both instruments on both airplanes during the ARCTAS mission. Cloud condensation nuclei, CCN, are those particles in the atmosphere that form cloud droplets, and are an important link between the physics and chemistry of atmospheric particles. The mechanisms by which particles alter cloud properties remain one of the greatest uncertainties in the field of atmospheric science. Terry is supported by a NASA Graduate Student Research Fellowship, and during his term he will continue to incorporate CCN measurements into field campaigns and use the resulting data in combination with other particle measurements to better understand aerosol-cloud-climate interactions on a global scale. Growing up on the outskirts of the Appalachians, he stepped foot on his first airplane just 2 years ago, and many days still finds it hard to believe that he is now flying around the world collecting data on an airplane.

Michael D. Obland
Mike Obland began work as a postdoctoral fellow specializing in LIDAR at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., in June 2007. He works primarily with the high spectral resolution LIDAR instrument flying on NASA's King Air B-200. Mike started seriously thinking about working for NASA when he participated in the NASA Academy at Ames Research Center as an undergraduate from the University of Montana. After completing his bachelor degrees in physics and mathematics, Mike continued on to Montana State University where he finished both his master's and doctoral degrees in physics. Mike was supported in his doctoral studies by a NASA graduate student researchers program fellowship wherein he built a LIDAR that specifically maps out water vapor in the atmosphere. He was also the project manager for building Montana State's first satellite, which was called Montana EaRth-Orbiting Pico-Explorer (MEROPE). It was lost when the Russian rocket carrying it failed to make it into orbit and crashed in the Kazakhstan desert.

Brian J. Stocks
Brian Stocks has degrees in forestry from the University of Toronto, Ontario and the University of California, Berkeley, and is president of B.J. Stocks Wildfire Investigations. He also is adjunct professor of Fire Science with the Faculty or Forestry at University of Toronto. During the first twenty years of his career, Brian's research activities covered many aspects of forest fire research, but focused primarily on field investigations designed to determine the influence of fuels and weather on forest fire behavior. Over the next fifteen years, he became increasingly involved in international, cross-disciplinary research in the area of forest fires and global change This research included early investigations into the potential impacts of climate change on boreal fire regimes in North America and Russia, and the extent and impact of vegetation fires globally. Brian is the author or co-author of more than 180 scientific papers covering many aspects of forest fire and global change research. After retiring from the Canadian Forest Service in 2005, Brian established a small private company (B.J. Stocks Wildfire Investigations Ltd.) to facilitate consultation on wildfire cause and behavior investigations. Brian has investigated numerous serious wildfires during his career, including fires involving substantial loss of life and property.