Interview with Britton Stephens

摘要

Britton Stephens is a Scientist III in the Earth Observing Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (CO, USA). He received a bachelor's degree in earth and planetary sciences from Harvard in 1993 and a PhD in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1999. Before joining NCAR in 2002, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Carbon Cycle and Greenhouse Gases group. His research has focused on developing and deploying new instruments for tower, ship, and aircraft-based observations of atmospheric O_2 and CO_2, and on synthesizing data sets and models to elucidate global carbon cycle processes.He maintains a network of CO_2 instruments in the US Rocky Mountains and an O_2 instrument on a ship in the Southern Ocean. His research contributions include a synthesis of airborne data that led to a major revision of model-based estimates of the global distribution of terrestrial CO_2 fluxes.Britton Stephens speaks to Ruth Williamson, Commissioning Editor for Carbon Management, about promising state-of-the-art instruments for measuring atmospheric carbon cycle species, the challenges of conducting research on land, oceans and in the air, and important future directions for carbon cycle research.