Sometimes taking a look out the window just isn't good enough. So, for those times when you've got a really tough weather question, call DRI's James Ashby.
Ashby is an assistant climatologist at the institute's Western Regional Climate
Center (WRCC), part of a network administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. The WRCC provides climate services and information to 12 western
states and territories. Ashby says much of his job is service oriented, answering
requests for climate data from a surprising variety of people. "Customers
include attorneys, insurance companies, construction companies, universities,
newspapers, environmental consultants, and folks looking to retire to the perfect
spot."< BR>
Apparently, weather is also often one of the missing pieces to a
puzzle, and Ashby has helped out with a mystery or two. "I
received numerous calls regarding the O.J. case and the weather on the
night of the murders. I've received calls from TV shows, the most
recent being the weather in Roswell, New Mexico, back in 1947 for the
Fox Network show called Alien Autopsy. Ashby's been interested
in the weather since childhood, when he would cut weather data from the
newspaper and paste it in a scrapbook. Now at the WRCC, he's got access
to a huge collection of weather data from around the world. What's to
be done with all that information? Ashby hopes to publish a climate
atlas, initially for Nevada and the Reno area. "Having access to
an enormous data set gives us a unique opportunity to work up climate
summaries for any place in the western U.S. with possible climate
atlases for all the states."
Not surprisingly for one so immersed in the ways of weather, Ashby likes to spend his free time outside. "I enjoy anything that has to do with the outdoors-skiing, camping, hiking. My favorite activity is exploring the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau in Utah and Arizona." And remember, if you're wondering about something weatherish, you can reach Ashby and the Western Regional Climate Center at (702) 677-3106, email at jawrcc@sage.dri.edu, or on the World Wide Web at http://wrcc.sage.dri.edu.
While Shaulis is doing her academic work for a Ph.D. in biology at UNLV, she's also living the life of a working scientist, and finding it has its own educational benefits. "What I really enjoy about working at DRI is that we really are doing state-of-the-art research. I have opportunities to interface with both DRI and non-DRI scientists who have similar or complementary interests and so I'm always learning more."
Right now, Shaulis has two main projects at the institute. The first, her dissertation research, is using remote sensing to estimate and scale evapotranspiration from salt cedar growing along the Virgin River in Nevada. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is sponsoring this research to determine a hydrologic balance for the river and to better understand southern Nevada's water resources.
Shaulis is also collaborating with researchers from UNLV, UNR and DRI on the Mojave Desert FACE study which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. The FACE (free-air carbon dioxide enrichment) study will examine the effects of elevated carbon dioxide on desert ecosystems. Shaulis hopes remote sensing can be used to indirectly determine physiological changes in the plants that are caused by the high carbon dioxide, avoiding the need to take numerous individual samples of plant tissues. "If `normal' levels of sampling were performed in the field, pretty soon there wouldn't be any plants left to sample. Therefore, we're hoping we can develop sufficient correlations between plant spectral changes (measured with remote sensing) and carbon dioxide-induced physiological changes." If those correlations exist, remote sensing could probably be used to model the effect of increased carbon dioxide on plants at regional or global scales.