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Santonu Goswami at the two ends of the Earth!

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image002.jpgSantonu Goswami been involved in climate change research in the polar region for the last three years. He is a doctoral student in the environmental science and engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso and is working under the supervision of Dr. Craig E. Tweedie at the Systems Ecology Lab in the University of Texas at El Paso and Dr. John Gamon from the Dept of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.

As part of his PhD research, Santonu is working on a multi-million dollar National Science Foundation funded multidisciplinary project involving researchers from different universities from across the US. The project is a large scale hydrological manipulation project in Barrow, Alaska to investigate the effects of simulated climate change scenarios because of varying soil moisture in the land atmosphere carbon budget in the high Arctic tundra ecosystem. In the project, the water table of a drying arctic lakebed is manipulated to create three hydrological regimes of flooding, draining and control (undisturbed) and data are collected in the three manipulated areas to do the investigation. As part of his part of the research, Santonu uses an innovative robotic tram system to collect hyperspectral reflectance data in along three transects over the three manipulated sections of the dry lakebed to investigate the effect of the treatment on the surface reflectance properties of the tundra biome. It is worth mentioning that the tramline system that Santonu uses to collect his data is the largest permanent spectral data collection system in the entire world which could also be used for the purpose of satellite data validation in predominantly cloud covered polar region. He hopes to address some of the unanswered key questions in the area of remote sensing from his findings from the dissertation work which, he hopes, will be able to contribute significantly in the realm of the climate change studies in the Arctic.

image004.jpgThe following picture shows the tundra landscape in the summer. This shows the experimental setup of the hydrological manipulation project. In the horizon is the Arctic Ocean. The extreme heterogeneity of the tundra landscape and also the predominance of tundra ponds are shown nicely in this picture.

Santonu was also part of an expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula in December, 2007 – January, 2008. The expedition named IPY-ROAM (www.ipyroam.org) was one of the nine education awards made from National Science Foundation for the International Polar Year 2007-2009. As part of the expedition, a total of twenty nine participants were selected from a national pool of candidates which included graduate students, undergraduate students and also school teachers. The expedition started from Ushuaia, Argentina and visited several islands of the Antarctica Peninsula during the ten days expedition before coming back to Ushuaia again. As part of this expedition, Santonu worked as a member of the terrestrial ecology group and investigated the marine-terrestrial nutrient exchange in the Antarctic terrestrial ecosystem using hyperspectral reflectance.

One of the many dreams that Santonu has for the future is to establish an ecosystem monitoring system in the Himalayan region to study the effects of climate change in the northeast India region.

More information can be found at the following links:


http://santonugoswami.info
http://sel.utep.edu/


By Jugal Kalita