In a week when heat waves are sweeping the country, a post about green roofs seems appropriate. Environmentalists have long espoused putting plants on top of buildings as a way to improve air quality in cities and reduce the urban island heat effect. Sounds nice, but what are the real impacts of green roofs? Will they reduce runoff water into storm drains? Will they clean the runoff water? Will they cool the city? And will green roofs absorb or emit methane and other greenhouse gases.

As I write this, I’m sitting on a ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules cargo plane from the New York Air National Guard’s 109^th Airlift Wing, flying over Greenland, having just taken off from the NEEM camp at 77°N latitude where the sun is up 24 hours a day.

I've got two simple yet evocative phrases  for you. Wing pods. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Excited? We are. During late June, a team of top scientists from the NASA Ames Research Center deployed three Picarro analyzers as part of the The Railroad Valley Vicarious Calibration Campaign, a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif. One of the analyzers was deployed in a wing pod of an Alpha jet which flew up to altitudes of 25,000 feet. Another was deployed in the nose cone of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.

The expedition also has what we reckon must be one of the most well-travelled Picarro analyzer’s.  Dr. Antonio Delgado and his team from CSIC, Granada, received their isotopic CO2 analyzer nearly two years ago.  In this time it’s been measuring up in the snowy Sierra Nevada, as well as well as on the Spanish plain.

Climate scientists can be divided into two large interactive groups: Experimentalists, who go out into the world and collect climate data (e.g., levels of carbon dioxide, methane concentration, seasonal temperature, snowfall rates, etc.); and Modelers, those who build computer simulations based on that data (called “climate models” by those in the know) to estimate how climate variables affect one another (e.g., does increasing CO₂ increase temperature enough to melt polar ice caps that will raise sea levels so high that Miami will be the next Atlantis?).