Scientists in northern Wisconsin to examine how plants affect local climates

By next summer, an army of towers will be keeping watch over a plot of land in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest of northern Wisconsin. 

The study dubbed CHEESEHEAD19 also will include a turboprop plane, an ultralight aircraft, a Cessna, ground-based atmospheric instruments and a troop of students and scientists. They will be working to understand how plants and trees contribute to weather patterns on a local scale.

CHEESEHEAD19 stands for Chequamegon Heterogeneous Ecosystem Energy-balance Study Enabled by a High-density Extensive Array of Detectors 2019.

Ankur Desai, a UW-Madison professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, is heading the effort, having recently received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

An additional $1.5 million will fund instrumentation required for the study.

“It may help us improve weather forecasting because it will tell us how vegetation and forest management influence the atmosphere,” says Desai, a member of the Center for Climatic Research at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

When plants are green and growing, they absorb carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis, converting it into food and oxygen. The plants also exchange water with the soil and the air. 

However, in the fall, only some plants are green and growing while others are dropping their leaves. This means the amount of carbon dioxide and water they cycle with the atmosphere becomes more variable.

Desai and his colleagues want to know whether this variability changes how heat and moisture dissipate up and down within the atmosphere and how that leads to cloud formation and the development of storms on a local scale.

“Weather and climate models are poor at getting at this because they are on a large-scale,” Desai says.

Over the course of two years, beginning in 2019, the research team will collect measurements in an area of just under 4 square miles from a region of the country sensitive to changes in climate. 

In addition to the instruments on a tower for WLEF-TV, the National Center for Atmospheric Research will deploy 17 flux towers, allowing scientists to capture data from a range of places within the study site.

Desai says the team will collaborate with schools in northern Wisconsin to involve middle and high school students. 

“I think this is a relatively underserved area and we are bringing high-tech science into their backyard,” he says.