Doug Sisterson
Doug Sisterson
October / November 2011
Volume 9 Number 5
When climate researcher Doug Sisterson first came to work at Argonne National Laboratory in the 1970s, one of his first projects involved launching weather balloons to study the lowest levels of the atmosphere. “I remember very clearly, one night during my first year here, feeling very calm winds at ground level but seeing a windmill 100 feet high that was turning to beat the band,” Sisterson said. “It was impossible for me not to wonder, ‘How could that be?’”
At the time, Sisterson and his colleagues were looking at understanding just the basic fundamental behavior of the atmosphere—how it breathes and exchanges air at the lowest 3,000 feet. Since then, Sisterson’s career has taken off just like one of his balloons. Today, he works for a worldwide collaboration called the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program for the Department of Energy. ARM’s mission is to collect meteorological data at sites that span the entirety of the globe, from Alaska to Papua New Guinea. Sisterson and other ARM researchers hope that a combination of researcher astuteness and specialized instrumentation can generate a more comprehensive view of the climate picture.
“Even though something close to 95 percent of scientists studying climate agree that the Earth is getting warmer because we’re burning fossil fuels, the problem comes from wanting to know what's going to happen in specific locations,” Sisterson said. “That sort of prediction can easily become quite complex, and that’s where we start losing consensus. I imagine that it can get really confusing to the public, with one scientist saying one particular thing will happen and another saying, ‘No, you didn't take into account that the earth wobbles or the effect of sunspots or whatever,’” he said.
Since its inception in 1990, ARM’s reach has gradually expanded to include meteorological data collected in India, Oklahoma, the Azores and Australia, among other locations. An injection of funds from the recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act gave the program the ability to procure instrumentation capable of probing some of the world’s greatest climate mysteries, according to Sisterson. “The stimulus funding allowed us to add incredibly important additional pieces to our toolkit," he said. “We’re now able to go into harsher conditions and remote places where we’ve never before had the ability to collect data.”
Despite recent advances made in climatology, Sisterson still often encounters frustration when trying to state his case to the public. “I think the hardest part for me personally is finding a way to give credibility to the exact kind of climate research we’re doing, in order for the public to differentiate fact from fiction. Climate change on the global scale is the real deal, but the timing and magnitude is not certain,” Sisterson said.
Although his research has focused primarily on taking climatological observations, Sisterson’s investigations have also yielded information about the interplay of atmospheric patterns and energy generation. “Climate science and energy research can often be two sides of the same coin,” he said. “When we were first launching our balloons back in the ‘70s, we began to realize that almost half of the evenings here in the Midwest had more than enough wind energy to turn windmills and generate wind energy.” Furthermore, just as discoveries about climate helped engender further discoveries about energy generation, the same process worked in reverse as well. “Researchers used to think the nighttime wind speeds at the surface were near zero, so all the computer models would never move the pollution generated in Chicago from Chicago,” he said.
But thanks to observations by Sisterson and his colleagues, researchers eventually realized that the wind around the Windy City did bear heavily on Chicago’s pollution problem. “It soon became apparent to us that cities’ pollution comes not only from its own cars and factories, but also from upwind cities. Once we figured out how the wind blew at night, all the models were corrected and we could see that pollution from say, St. Louis would be carried on the nighttime breeze and mix with in with the Chicago air. So pollution is not a purely local problem.”
In his career, Sisterson has contributed to finding solutions to climate and energy problems both on the global and the regional scale. Through his work with ARM, Sisterson has given scientists access to data that can provide a more comprehensive view of climate in particular locations -- just as his early work looking at pollution in Chicago enabled researchers and policymakers to understand that one city isn’t responsible for all of its own pollution. “For what we know, Chicago could be mucking up air that's in the northern parts of Michigan that are supposed to be pristine. The work we did then created a whole new way of thinking we put into practice today—that pollution and climate are both local and global problems.”
Jared Sagoff and Louise Lerner are writers at Argonne National Laboratory.
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