My research program focuses on studying: ‘the physical, biological and chemical processes that govern trace gas and energy exchange between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere’. In layman terms, my broad objective is to understand how the terrestrial biosphere ‘breathes’; plants and microbes exchange trace gases, in and out of the atmosphere, in their quest to acquire the energy needed to support their metabolism.
The science of biometeorology involves the study of a suite of biophysical processes that exert positive and negative feedbacks upon one another, across a spectrum of time and space scales.
Many of the biophysical processes (e.g. turbulence and diffusion, photon transfer through vegetation, evaporation and transpiration, photosynthesis, plant and soil respiration, and stomatal mechanics) of interest are non-linear functions of such meteorological state variables as light, wind, temperature, humidity and CO2 concentration. In turn, that state of these meteorological variables is a function of the rates at which leaves and soils exchange mass, energy and momentum to and from the atmosphere.