Amador County
has made the map in more ways than one. A site in Ione is now on a worldwide
map as part of an environmental study that uses a series of towers through out
the world to measure the exchanges of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and energy
between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. The project is called Fluxnet and the goal of the project
is to provide information to FLUXNET investigators and the public with the goal
to understand the mechanisms controlling the exchanges of carbon dioxide, water
vapor, and energy across a spectrum of time and space scales. The project
is being conducted by Oak Ridge
National Laboratory
Distributed Active
Archive Center
(ORNL DAAC) and is a NASA-sponsored source for biogeochemical and ecological
data as well as models useful in environmental research. There are currently
over 400 tower sites operating on a long-term and continuous basis around the
world and one of those towers is located right here in Ione.
The 65 foot tower called the Tonzi Ranch tower, is
used to monitor and collect data on site vegetation, soil, hydrologic, and
meteorological characteristics in the Ione area, considered an Oak Savannah. The information is then coordinated into a regional and global analysis of observations
from the micrometeorological tower sites. The local tower itself is a metal
tower that uses instruments to measure the amount of sunlight coming in. Below
the trees and a few feet above the ground, a bread-box sized robot glides back
and forth along a 30-meter track through patches of sun and shade, measuring
how much sunlight gets through the leaves to the grass below. Another
instrument on the tower measures how much light is reflected back up from the
ground. A network of tubes
collects air samples from different heights along the tower to be analyzed for
carbon dioxide. The carbon coming from the atmosphere, the ground and
the plants has different ratios of carbon isotopes -- or forms of carbon with
slightly different masses -- which scientists can use to determine where the
carbon dioxide is coming from and where it is going. The hope by scientists
from UC Berkeley detailed grasp of when, how and how much carbon flows in and
out of different ecosystems. This picture will put climate scientists one step
closer to understanding what the future holds.
