Guiding ozone layer recovery with effective science and policy on an international scale
by Stephen Montzka, NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratories/Global Monitoring Laboratory
Abstract: Depletion of Earth's vital ozone layer was first noticed in the mid-1980s over Antarctica. As it became clear that human-produced chemicals were the source of the problem, all countries of the world convened and agreed to an international protocol in 1987 to address the issue. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has been adjusted and amended numerous times in response to advances in scientific understanding. This interplay between new scientific knowledge and international policy continues today and has recently been put to the test with our discovery in 2018 of an apparent violation of the Protocol by a country or countries (Montzka et. al, 2018, and Rigby et al., 2019). In this presentation Steve will discuss the issue of ozone depletion, the general mechanisms of the Protocol, highlight the observational evidence we have acquired indicating an apparent violation, and describe how the Parties to the Protocol have responded to the problem, which can be viewed as a fundamental threat to the success of the Protocol and ozone layer recovery.
Biography: Steve Montzka has worked as a research chemist at NOAA since the early 1990s. He leads a ongoing global-scale program making atmospheric measurements of over 30 chemicals that affect stratospheric ozone, climate, and air quality. He still gets a kick out of uncovering new insights into the workings of the global atmosphere those data provide, and using his results to inform policymakers on the international stage about the effectiveness of global environmental agreements, such as the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
ESOC coffee hour occurs weekly from 9-10am in the ESOC Reading Room (Ekeley W230). ESOC researchers, post-docs and graduate students gather for conversation and to discuss research. Occasional guest speakers are invited to give short presentations on topics of interest.
Visual Analytics and Interactive Machine Learning for Geospatial Sciences by Dr. Morteza Karimzadeh, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, CU Boulder
Machine learning is increasingly used in various stages of scientific inquiry, from data cleaning and fusion, to analysis and insight generation. The full realization of machine learning in many scenarios is still limited by the sparsity of labeled training data, which is expensive and difficult to generate. Even when available, labeled training datasets capture a snapshot in time and space, resulting in models that may not perform well under different conditions. Additionally, models may reflect the biases inherent in the training data. In this talk, I will present on multiple interactive visual analytics frameworks for the simultaneous labeling, learning and analysis of data in two different domains, namely streaming social media document analytics and feature selection in hyperspectral imagery for precision agriculture. Both represent cases with spatiotemporal heterogeneity and limited training data for building performant models. In presenting these visual analytics approaches, I will break down the underlying computational components and the interactive interfaces, and draw connections on how such approaches can be adopted in cryospheric data and research, as well as other domains utilizing multi-source, dynamic and streaming data.