One thing I probably do a little too much of in this job is travel. While it can be a hassle, you do get to see a lot of places, meet a lot of interesting people and grow on both personal and professional levels. And like all matters in life, there are the little things that bring a smile to your face; learning cultural stereotypes are indeed expressed through national train operations; most people are nice, courteous and generally happy to talk to a visitor; every local food/drink is just great; and last but not least, the in-flight magazines can be good entertainment.

Methane and City Carbon^TM have become buzzwords here at Picarro. Surely anyone familiar with carbon emissions and climate change knows that methane is a potent greenhouse gas and most emissions originate from cities.

The Centre for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark is one of the birthplaces of ice core science.  In 1954 Willi Dansgaard [1] suggested the correlation between the oxygen isotope ratio and temperature at which the precipitation was formed and postulated that past climate changes could be discerned by such measurements. Ten years later, in 1964, Willi Dansgaard outlined the capabilities and limitations of the isotopic paleothermometer for glaciological uses in Greenland and Antarctica in a milestone publication in Tellus [2].

It's commonly said here at Picarro that our customers have more interesting lives than we do -- we're always receiving fantastic photos of someone with one of our instruments in some remote and often idyllic field location. We thought it would be fun to periodically share some of the amazing locations where our customers are doing field work. Here are the five that we've come up with this quarter including links to their research sites and a few selected photos (mouse over photos for captions): 

In my role as an Applications Scientist here at Picarro, I’m always getting questions from customers like, “So what’s new?” and “What new technology breakthroughs are you guys working on?” To better address these questions, I spoke with Picarro Senior System Engineer Dr. Yonggang He about the recent technology innovations that have enabled us to boost the performance of our isotopic carbon analyzers. Here’s a bit of our discussion: