Welcome to the Berkeley Biometeorology Lab Web site.

The general theme of research in the Biometeorology lab is on:

"trace gas and energy exchange between vegetation, soils and the atmosphere."

The ultimate goal of our research is to predict the fluxes of a suite of greenhouse gases everywhere, and all of the time, with the aim towards understanding 'the breathing of the Biosphere'.

Our research approach involves the coordinated use of experiment, long-term field measurements and theoretical models to understand the physical, biological, and chemical processes that control trace gas fluxes between the biosphere and atmosphere and to quantify their temporal and spatial variations. The spatial scales of this work ranges across domain of roots and microbes in the soil,to leaves and plants, and how they are assembled as canopies and landscapes. The temporal aspect of this work ranges from seconds through hours, days, seasons, years, and now, decades.

Lines of inquiry revolve around quantifying the fluxes of greenhouse gases (e.g. water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane) of ecosystems that receive excess (e.g. wetlands, rice) or deficient (e.g. oak savanna and annual grasslands) amounts of water.The upscaling our site-based information, at regional and global scales is being accomplished through our coordination and association with the FLUXNET project and concurrent acquisition and analysis of multi-faceted remote sensing products.

Our scientific approach uses the eddy covariance to measure the net and gross fluxes of trace gases between ecosystems and the atmosphere. We augment these measurements with a variety of mechanistic studies that examine the physiological and biosphysical control on these fluxes. These efforts involve laboratory and field measurements on the exchange of gases from the soil, leaves and plants, like pre-dawn water potential, photosynthetic capacity, soil respiration, soil moisture, monitoring the water table and excavation of roots. To upscale our flux measurements we rely on an assortment of remote sensing measurements. These efforts include measuring light transmission through vegetation, monitoring hyperspectral reflectance of the vegetation, time series of canopy photos to monitor phenology and LIDAR surveys of vegetation structure. Together we digest, distill and evaluate this information fluxes and biophysical structure and function of the canopies through a hierarchy of biophysical models, derived from the CANVEG family. Our most recent efforts have been to build on the efforts from our field work to develop a model that can be run with remote sensing information derived from MODIS to produce flux information on carbon and water exchange at high spatial resolution (1-5 km) across the globe, from days to years.