Dear Eos:
Greetings from the Great Lakes Basin!
In this postcard, Sean Woznicki, Ashtyn Gluck, and Jillian Greene are deploying a do-it-yourself autonomous floating chamber in one of western Michigan’s estuaries to measure methaneflux during the summer. Quantifying the flux of methane (a greenhouse gas that is nearly 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide) from both natural and anthropogenic sources is a priority for global climate science.
In addition to deploying floats, we discretely sampled the lake water for methane concentrations and paired data with satellite-derived water quality information that enabled model development for lake-wide extrapolation of measured fluxes.
—Jillian Greene, North Carolina State University, Raleigh; Ashtyn Gluck, Auburn University, Auburn, Ala.; Sean Woznicki and Bopi Biddanda, Grand Valley State University, Muskegon, Mich.; and Mike Philben, Hope College, Holland, Mich.