Newtown Resident At Work—

An Instrument To Help Predict Climate Change, Global Warming

Has Been Developed And Is Being Tested By Professor James Boyle

DANBURY — Anyone who has ever tried to skim the cool “skin” off the top of warm pudding knows about the delicacy needed in the research Dr James P. Boyle is conducting.

“Water in the ocean behaves similar to the pudding,” said Dr Boyle, who is an associate professor of physics and meteorology at Western Connecticut State University.

“There’s an extremely thin, cool ‘skin’ on the ocean surface,” said Dr Boyle, who is also a Newtown resident. “I’m trying to place a thermometer into that skin, which is difficult because it’s only a fraction of a millimeter deep.”

Since 1997, Dr Boyle has been developing a lightweight instrument with several sensors to directly measure heat exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean, determine the water surface skin temperature, gauge air and water temperature near the surface, and calculate the shape of the water surface and its motion. With implications for predicting hurricanes and exploring global warming, the research recently took Dr Boyle and two students to a NASA facility on Virginia’s eastern shore.

“The oceanographic and meteorological communities have been interested in these measurements for quite some time,” said Dr Boyle. “Forecasters make predictions based primarily on measurements of a system. Now it’s too expensive to obtain adequate measurements to characterize the oceans, which is one reason forecasting is so difficult.”

With the devastation of the 2005 hurricane season still fresh and predictions for another active season beginning June 1, Dr Boyle hopes his instrument someday will help forecast extreme weather conditions and provide information about climate change. Low cost and simple operation are among the advantages of Dr Boyle’s machine.

“Hundreds of my multisensor floats could be deployed from ships or aircraft to provide ground truth for satellite-based measurements and support for air-sea flux field experiments,” said Dr Boyle. “In order to understand potential climate change and climate variability, you need to understand how the atmosphere and ocean work together. It’s a coupled system.”

WestConn recently received a nearly $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Dr Boyle’s “Development of a Third Generation Surface Contact Heat, Flux, Temperature and Sea State Measurement Instrument.” The funding runs through 2007 and Dr Boyle is using it to refine the instrument, which uses a porous fiberglass fabric stretched inside a foam ring that is about eight inches in diameter to support the sensors where the air and sea meet.

“My device is a wave-following float that’s similar to a Frisbee disc,” explained Dr Boyle, who has a bachelor of science in engineering degree and was an engineer for the US Department of Energy.

Grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Office of Naval Research have supported development of earlier versions of Dr Boyle’s device.

“It is a continuing process to develop this wave-following instrument,” Dr Boyle said. “With this NSF funding, I’m establishing the accuracy of the measurements.”

To that end, Dr Boyle and the two sophomore WestConn meteorology majors — Joseph “J.J.” DePasqua and Joseph Roy — took the device to a NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center wave tank this spring. Dr Boyle and the students tested several of these instruments for ten days at the NASA Air-Sea Interaction Research Facility at Wallops Flight Facility (NASIRF) on Wallops Island, Va.

NASIRF is focused on exploring the interaction of the atmosphere and the ocean, explained Steven R. Long, the research oceanographer who manages and schedules research at NASIRF.

“Professor Boyle’s instrument is intended to float right at the boundary of the atmosphere and the ocean and measure several important parameters, specifically, temperatures and the transfer of heat,” said Mr Long. “These are important to the better understanding of the complex mechanisms at work at the air-sea interface and play a critical role in understanding gas exchanges involved in the study of global warming and ‘greenhouse gas’ problems.

“Our facility allows us to control the wind, waves, currents, temperatures and humidity, providing for a detailed check on Professor Boyle’s instrument. His device records what is occurring and —with our other measurements — helps provide a complete record of the process,” Mr Long added.