Amigos de MexFlux: Eugenia González del Castillo Aranda

Eugenia is a project technician at Instituto de Ciencias de la Atmósfera y Cambio Climático, UNAM. She has worked at the site Chamela in Jalisco, México.

Which are the lines of research of your working group?

I coordinate the technical part of a network of atmospheric observatories (www.ruoa.unam.mx) with presence in several states. We monitor the weather at 17 sites in the country and various atmospheric parameters at some of them, such as air quality, greenhouse gases, wet deposits, among others. I do not do research as such, although I am involved in various research projects that use this data generated by the network, I am particularly interested in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Which project are you currently working on and participating in?

I participate in two monitoring networks: University Network of Atmospheric Observatories (RUOA) and the Meteorological Stations Program of the University Baccalaureate (PEMBU). In particular, I am involved in measurements of CO2 and CH4 in urban sites (Juriquilla and Ciudad Universitaria in CDMX) and sites located in ANP (Altzomoni, EdoMex and Chamela, Jalisco).
Use of low and medium cost microsensors to monitor CO2 concentrations in CDMX (www.epr.atmosfera.unam.mx/Merci-CO2/)
Measurements of respiratory flows in soil in the Tlalpan Forest.
Participated in the preparations for the new Mexican Observatory of Climate and Atmospheric Composition (OMECCA) in Calakmul, Campeche, which will include a turbulent covariance tower in a sub-evergreen forest site.

Briefly tell us how or when you started working on ecosystem fluxes.

The first project in which I was involved in measuring flows with the turbulent covariance technique was in a cottonwood forest in the floodplain of the Cosumnes River, in California. The theory behind the measurements, the field work with sensors, and the complexity of gas and energy exchange in that system was fascinating to me.

What study or project lead you to think about fluxes?

For my undergraduate thesis we measured CO2 and H2O fluxes at the stem and leaf level, and that led me to wonder how it would be possible to scale this type of monitoring to the landscape level. I learned that one of the techniques to do this was turbulent covariance, and I looked for a postgraduate course that would allow me to learn about it. During my PhD fieldwork, I had the opportunity to install and operate a gas and energy exchange tower in a tropical deciduous forest for about 8 years, which was relatively new at the time. Understanding the processes of turbulent exchange, of advection, of how the biota interacts with the atmosphere was an intense, exciting, and revealing learning experience.

Which is the most interesting, surprising or unexpected discovery of your study/studies or project(s) (share links to papers)?

It was not unexpected, but the intensity of the first gas flows in response to the rains in a system highly dependent on the availability of water such as the tropical deciduous forest of the Jalisco coast was something very interesting to witness; the forest acquires a completely different physiognomy in a period of about 10 days after the start of the rains. Also, the speed with which vegetation modulates its response to both dry season rainfall and intra-summer drought was surprising to me.
Discover that the respiration models we inherit from temperate sites may be highly inadequate to describe the response of dry tropical systems.

What do you do for fun or a hobby beyond the academy?

I like reading, cooking, doing puzzles, and enjoying long walks with Yoko, my faithful old dog.