Laura Belica PhD

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representatives of the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards (OAQPS) have expressed a need for staff training on data analysis and presentation skills, including but not limited to work in spreadsheets, basic statistical analyses, mapping, and how to discuss analysis results. This training will be developed at a level for staff members without substantial experience in data management or analysis. Students who complete the training should emerge with an understanding of fundamental steps in data analysis and the readiness to initiate, complete, visualize, and effectively communicate high quality data analyses within EPA.

Solar radiation is the main source of heat to headwater streams, but has remained challenging to estimate because headwater streams are small, numerous, spatially and temporally variable, often concealed by riparian vegetation, and traverse long distances through variable topography, landcover, and atmospheric conditions. Recent advances in remote sensing techniques and computational power provide an opportunity to include atmospheric and vegetative shading effects in spatially explicit and extensive high resolution models of solar radiation which could improve estimation of the amount solar radiation reaching headwater streams. This study will include both atmospheric and forest canopy conditions by parameterizing real-sky atmospheric conditions in a recently developed high resolution subcanopy solar radiation modeling method and evaluate the accuracy of the estimates with direct measurements of subcanopy solar radiation in a montane, forested, headwater basin. This will be done by computing atmospheric attenuation parameters from satellite remote sensing data for inclusion in the implemention the Subcanopy Solar Radiation Model, a recently developed method that incorporates solar radiation attenuation through forest canopies by adding a light penetration index derived from airborne LiDAR data to an established GIS solar radiation model. Two components of atmospheric attenuation of solar radiation will be characterized, using existing methods and publicly available data for the study area, to parameterize the model; the Linke Turbidity value, a measure of atmospheric absorption, reflection, and scattering by aerosols and water vapor (not including clouds), and the clear-sky index, a measure of cloudiness, needed to parameterize the effects of real sky conditions of the total amount and relative proportions of direct and diffuse solar radiation passing reaching the canopy surface. Estimates will be evaluated with an existing dataset of high-accuracy pyranometer measurements of solar radiation collected during summer in a forested headwater basin in the Southern Appalachian Mountains at sites representing a range of canopy types and sky conditions. It is expected that using real-sky atmospheric conditions in the model will improve the accuracy of the estimates in comparison to parameterization with climatological monthly mean values and assumptions of completely clear sky conditions.