[Applause]
hi I’m Claire and yes I’ve been
introduced I’m an atmospheric chemist
and that means that my research is all
about understanding there at the
chemical composition of the atmosphere
and the reason that we’re interested in
this is because of issues like ozone
depletion greenhouse gases and air
quality and today I’m going to share
some stories from working in the field
starting with talking about traveling to
the Arctic to look at the chemistry
involved in ozone depletion and then I’m
going to talk about measuring emissions
from bushfires and finally talk about
measuring greenhouse gases on the Murray
River in the depths of the bomber forest
before I start I need to explain there
are two basic ways that you can measure
the chemical composition of the air one
is just to suck it into the instrument
like you were breathing it into your
lungs and to measure it within the
instrument the other is to measure the
gases remotely using light gases absorb
parts of light and leave a kind of
fingerprint so that you can look at the
spectrum of light and work out what
gases are there and what quantity so
this image shows a solar tracker on the
top of the chemistry building here at
the University of Wollongong the tracker
takes light into the instrument in the
building below and into the spectrometer
where it can separate it into the
different frequencies so we can see the
light that’s being absorbed by the gases
and work out what’s there there’s a
whole network of these instruments
around the globe and in order to do good
science we need to ensure that all these
instruments agree with one another so
one way to do that is to have a
travelling standard instrument and I had
the luck in the 1990s to be one of the
people involved in taking this
instrument and running it alongside
other instruments in the globe and
particularly in the High Arctic in order
to make sure that the instruments all
agreed with one another so I went to
these three different sites first of
Spitsbergen I think you can probably see
their image you can see England down
sort of to the right in the
I was living in London at a time so we
went up to Spitsbergen which is about
the same amount north of Iceland as
Iceland is from north of Britain also to
Karuna I won’t talk about that much
today and finally to Yuriko in the high
north of the Canadian Arctic so my first
experience in the Arctic was in
Spitsbergen this was a pretty intense
experience for me it took four separate
flights to get there from London in an
increasingly smaller aircraft and I
think there were two flights passed when
I last saw something growing beyond
ankle height and when we arrived there
it was quite a strange atmosphere
everyone was very jumpy we arrived in
May and in February a 19 year old
student had been eaten by a polar bear
that meant that we were largely confined
to the base and even when we wanted to
go out to the airstrip we were acquired
to carry a very large rifle which I had
no idea of what to do with we were fed
very strangely there was a large
communal kitchen and it would serve
things like a pickled fish and smoked
reindeer but there was no way you could
make yourself a cup of coffee but the
strangest thing of all was 24 hour
daylight so no day and no night just one
long continuous day this should have
been great for us because we have the
solar tracker we want to make those
measurements in the sunlight but it was
the cloudiest time of my life so we had
to take it in turns to check out and
wake up in the sort of night when we
were trying to sleep to check whether we
had good weather so you wake up at
midnight I wake up at 2:00 you wake up
at 4:00 wake up at 6:00 etc so three
long weeks went by my colleagues left my
boss said I could stay there till the
end of the year if I need to finally
when I give an up hope of going home the
clouds cleared and we got good
measurements and we ascertained that yes
indeed the instruments agreed with it
the expected range and I could go home
so very excitedly I went to the airstrip
but when
right there the pilot said Oh is there a
person there as well
we’ve already packed all the boxes and
so desperate to get out I had to climb
and squeeze myself between the boxes and
the top of the aircraft and wriggle
along the length of it to the one spare
seat behind the pilot and when I
returned to London I really felt like I
was returning from moonbase for I think
the most alien thing was the 24-hour
daylight we take for granted that day
follows night and night follows day and
the absence of that made the Arctic feel
very otherworldly to me so the last of
the trips that I made to the Arctic was
to Eureka in the north of Canada and
this was even more remote it took six
flights to get there from London to
Toronto to Ottawa from Ottawa to equal
at from equilateral resolute and finally
to Eureka it really felt like another
world sometimes we got whiteouts where
you couldn’t see where the sky ended and
the sea began or where the land ended in
the sea began because of the snow and
the ice it was extremely cold like
typical temperatures of about minus 35
degrees centigrade so you really
couldn’t spend very long outside we were
thousands and thousands of miles from
the nearest doctor which was a slight
concern to me because at the time I was
pregnant with my first child and I
remember sipping fruit juice throughout
the day to stave off the morning
sickness because I hadn’t yet admitted
to my colleagues in my current condition
but the wonderful thing was there was
sunshine and even better the solar
tracker of the instrument there couldn’t
rotate the full 360 degrees and so we
had an enforced time of nine hours when
we couldn’t work and we could go back
and use the blackout blinds to sleep one
of the things you can see in the lower
left hand corner the photograph there
that’s me and my colleague we’d walked
out to visit the iceberg across the
frozen sea we had to wear these neoprene
masks because if you if you’re unlucky
like a previous Japanese colleague he
hadn’t factored in the windchill and
when he returned from the iceberg he got
frostbite on his face
so this was my last Arctic trip and
three years later I emigrated to
Australia so since moving to the
University of Wollongong the type of
fieldwork I’ve done has changed somewhat
and I’ve become really interested in
bushfires and particularly their effect
on air quality so in this image you can
see a spectrometer at the front there’s
a telescope attached and I hope you can
see through the burning bushes that
there’s some mirrors there so in a very
similar way to the solo remote sensing
what we’re doing here is we’re looking
at the spectral pattern that the gas is
being emitted by the fire makes in our
path and this information can then feed
into air quality models that look at the
impact downwind of the fires on our air
quality obviously the challenges in the
field are very different from being in
the Arctic it’s heat there’s a problem
not cold you have to watch for falling
branches we had to have some basic
bushfire training you have to be aware
of the occasional and Sindri device
thrown by somebody in a helicopter above
but another thing that makes this really
different is that often you can be home
for a length tea and kiss your child
goodbye at night so obviously this is a
more suitable type of fieldwork for me
when I had a family in the last couple
of years I’ve also had the opportunity
to go to Malaysia and study the
emissions from peat fires these peat
fires caused absolutely terrible air
quality episodes the cover the whole of
Southeast Asia and are locally known as
the haze and while we were there we
discovered that freshly ignited fires
were far more polluting than more
developed and older fires we also
obviously the problem is mainly the heat
the temperature rather than being minus
35 degrees like in the Arctic is more
like plus 35 degrees and it’s extremely
humid what we found is some of the
instruments wouldn’t work well in the
heat but as you can see my student
became a dab hand at building shelters
out of palm fronds to shelter the
instruments and himself to a temperature
that he was able to work so finally I’m
going to talk about
another type of fieldwork that I did
looking at greenhouse gas exchange on
the Murray River it was a very nice and
tranquil visit down the river but we
were in a camp boat and the idea was
that you would camp out and there were
sort of sleeping places along the side
but we needed a lot of room for the
instruments we were running and by the
time we put all the equipment into the
boat there was barely anywhere for us to
stand let alone sleep so we needed to
find somewhere that we could more up
each night and camp on the side of the
river we found that we had some really
bad flooding here in the Barmah forest
so that we had some challenges some
night I remember mooring up in almost
complete darkness trying to find
somewhere that was an ankle deep in wet
and the other problem was that the balm
of forest has the bomber force virus
which is something very similar to the
Ross River virus and it’s spread by
mosquito bites and I swear to you I’ve
never seen a higher concentration of
insects than I experienced in the bomber
forest so finally I’d just like to say
when I look back on my 25 years as an
atmospheric chemist almost all of the
highlights are from working in the field
and a feel that impacts on other parts
of life field campaigns set markers in
the passing of the time in the same way
as large events in life do like weddings
and births and sharing these intense
experiences builds real friendship in
the fields so if you meet up with people
that you worked with in a campaign many
years later at a conference it really
feels like you’re meeting an old friend
and I think that field workers had a
major influence on the person that I am
today I consider myself extremely lucky
to have had the opportunities that
fieldworks provides and I would
recommend a career that includes field
work to anyone who will take the time to
listen to me thank you [Applause]
hi I’m Claire and yes I’ve been
introduced I’m an atmospheric chemist
and that means that my research is all
about understanding there at the
chemical composition of the atmosphere
and the reason that we’re interested in
this is because of issues like ozone
depletion greenhouse gases and air
quality and today I’m going to share
some stories from working in the field
starting with talking about traveling to
the Arctic to look at the chemistry
involved in ozone depletion and then I’m
going to talk about measuring emissions
from bushfires and finally talk about
measuring greenhouse gases on the Murray
River in the depths of the bomber forest
before I start I need to explain there
are two basic ways that you can measure
the chemical composition of the air one
is just to suck it into the instrument
like you were breathing it into your
lungs and to measure it within the
instrument the other is to measure the
gases remotely using light gases absorb
parts of light and leave a kind of
fingerprint so that you can look at the
spectrum of light and work out what
gases are there and what quantity so
this image shows a solar tracker on the
top of the chemistry building here at
the University of Wollongong the tracker
takes light into the instrument in the
building below and into the spectrometer
where it can separate it into the
different frequencies so we can see the
light that’s being absorbed by the gases
and work out what’s there there’s a
whole network of these instruments
around the globe and in order to do good
science we need to ensure that all these
instruments agree with one another so
one way to do that is to have a
travelling standard instrument and I had
the luck in the 1990s to be one of the
people involved in taking this
instrument and running it alongside
other instruments in the globe and
particularly in the High Arctic in order
to make sure that the instruments all
agreed with one another so I went to
these three different sites first of
Spitsbergen I think you can probably see
their image you can see England down
sort of to the right in the
I was living in London at a time so we
went up to Spitsbergen which is about
the same amount north of Iceland as
Iceland is from north of Britain also to
Karuna I won’t talk about that much
today and finally to Yuriko in the high
north of the Canadian Arctic so my first
experience in the Arctic was in
Spitsbergen this was a pretty intense
experience for me it took four separate
flights to get there from London in an
increasingly smaller aircraft and I
think there were two flights passed when
I last saw something growing beyond
ankle height and when we arrived there
it was quite a strange atmosphere
everyone was very jumpy we arrived in
May and in February a 19 year old
student had been eaten by a polar bear
that meant that we were largely confined
to the base and even when we wanted to
go out to the airstrip we were acquired
to carry a very large rifle which I had
no idea of what to do with we were fed
very strangely there was a large
communal kitchen and it would serve
things like a pickled fish and smoked
reindeer but there was no way you could
make yourself a cup of coffee but the
strangest thing of all was 24 hour
daylight so no day and no night just one
long continuous day this should have
been great for us because we have the
solar tracker we want to make those
measurements in the sunlight but it was
the cloudiest time of my life so we had
to take it in turns to check out and
wake up in the sort of night when we
were trying to sleep to check whether we
had good weather so you wake up at
midnight I wake up at 2:00 you wake up
at 4:00 wake up at 6:00 etc so three
long weeks went by my colleagues left my
boss said I could stay there till the
end of the year if I need to finally
when I give an up hope of going home the
clouds cleared and we got good
measurements and we ascertained that yes
indeed the instruments agreed with it
the expected range and I could go home
so very excitedly I went to the airstrip
but when
right there the pilot said Oh is there a
person there as well
we’ve already packed all the boxes and
so desperate to get out I had to climb
and squeeze myself between the boxes and
the top of the aircraft and wriggle
along the length of it to the one spare
seat behind the pilot and when I
returned to London I really felt like I
was returning from moonbase for I think
the most alien thing was the 24-hour
daylight we take for granted that day
follows night and night follows day and
the absence of that made the Arctic feel
very otherworldly to me so the last of
the trips that I made to the Arctic was
to Eureka in the north of Canada and
this was even more remote it took six
flights to get there from London to
Toronto to Ottawa from Ottawa to equal
at from equilateral resolute and finally
to Eureka it really felt like another
world sometimes we got whiteouts where
you couldn’t see where the sky ended and
the sea began or where the land ended in
the sea began because of the snow and
the ice it was extremely cold like
typical temperatures of about minus 35
degrees centigrade so you really
couldn’t spend very long outside we were
thousands and thousands of miles from
the nearest doctor which was a slight
concern to me because at the time I was
pregnant with my first child and I
remember sipping fruit juice throughout
the day to stave off the morning
sickness because I hadn’t yet admitted
to my colleagues in my current condition
but the wonderful thing was there was
sunshine and even better the solar
tracker of the instrument there couldn’t
rotate the full 360 degrees and so we
had an enforced time of nine hours when
we couldn’t work and we could go back
and use the blackout blinds to sleep one
of the things you can see in the lower
left hand corner the photograph there
that’s me and my colleague we’d walked
out to visit the iceberg across the
frozen sea we had to wear these neoprene
masks because if you if you’re unlucky
like a previous Japanese colleague he
hadn’t factored in the windchill and
when he returned from the iceberg he got
frostbite on his face
so this was my last Arctic trip and
three years later I emigrated to
Australia so since moving to the
University of Wollongong the type of
fieldwork I’ve done has changed somewhat
and I’ve become really interested in
bushfires and particularly their effect
on air quality so in this image you can
see a spectrometer at the front there’s
a telescope attached and I hope you can
see through the burning bushes that
there’s some mirrors there so in a very
similar way to the solo remote sensing
what we’re doing here is we’re looking
at the spectral pattern that the gas is
being emitted by the fire makes in our
path and this information can then feed
into air quality models that look at the
impact downwind of the fires on our air
quality obviously the challenges in the
field are very different from being in
the Arctic it’s heat there’s a problem
not cold you have to watch for falling
branches we had to have some basic
bushfire training you have to be aware
of the occasional and Sindri device
thrown by somebody in a helicopter above
but another thing that makes this really
different is that often you can be home
for a length tea and kiss your child
goodbye at night so obviously this is a
more suitable type of fieldwork for me
when I had a family in the last couple
of years I’ve also had the opportunity
to go to Malaysia and study the
emissions from peat fires these peat
fires caused absolutely terrible air
quality episodes the cover the whole of
Southeast Asia and are locally known as
the haze and while we were there we
discovered that freshly ignited fires
were far more polluting than more
developed and older fires we also
obviously the problem is mainly the heat
the temperature rather than being minus
35 degrees like in the Arctic is more
like plus 35 degrees and it’s extremely
humid what we found is some of the
instruments wouldn’t work well in the
heat but as you can see my student
became a dab hand at building shelters
out of palm fronds to shelter the
instruments and himself to a temperature
that he was able to work so finally I’m
going to talk about
another type of fieldwork that I did
looking at greenhouse gas exchange on
the Murray River it was a very nice and
tranquil visit down the river but we
were in a camp boat and the idea was
that you would camp out and there were
sort of sleeping places along the side
but we needed a lot of room for the
instruments we were running and by the
time we put all the equipment into the
boat there was barely anywhere for us to
stand let alone sleep so we needed to
find somewhere that we could more up
each night and camp on the side of the
river we found that we had some really
bad flooding here in the Barmah forest
so that we had some challenges some
night I remember mooring up in almost
complete darkness trying to find
somewhere that was an ankle deep in wet
and the other problem was that the balm
of forest has the bomber force virus
which is something very similar to the
Ross River virus and it’s spread by
mosquito bites and I swear to you I’ve
never seen a higher concentration of
insects than I experienced in the bomber
forest so finally I’d just like to say
when I look back on my 25 years as an
atmospheric chemist almost all of the
highlights are from working in the field
and a feel that impacts on other parts
of life field campaigns set markers in
the passing of the time in the same way
as large events in life do like weddings
and births and sharing these intense
experiences builds real friendship in
the fields so if you meet up with people
that you worked with in a campaign many
years later at a conference it really
feels like you’re meeting an old friend
and I think that field workers had a
major influence on the person that I am
today I consider myself extremely lucky
to have had the opportunities that
fieldworks provides and I would
recommend a career that includes field
work to anyone who will take the time to
listen to me thank you [Applause]
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