Category: research

My current research

Maps for publications

Since I do fieldwork all my publications contain some kind of map that identify sampling locations. Getting good maps and being allowed to publish them is not a trivial task. But now, after contacting Natural Resources Canada and obtaining permission to use their maps and after a session with the extremely helpful librarian at the Walter Hitschfeld Geographic Information Centre at McGill I am now able to use digitally reproduced maps in my articles!

Topographic maps are available – for free – at Natural Resources Canada using the CanMatrix set. Search by mapsheet and other criteria and off you go. Maps are in tiff format and meta-information is included for the corrdinate system! Nice! Also nifty, if you want to head out into the woods!

Lectures done!

… and all there is left to do are the final exam corrections – well that will be quite a bit of work, but that will not start until April 18 (or a few days later, when I will be receiving the exams from the exam’s office). Until then: Students dropping in, checking their midterms and assignments and asking questions. Panic mode is still a few days away for most, but I will brace myself for the day of the exam. I put the solutions to the try-out final exam online!

I gave a talk at Carleton University at the beginning of the week, which was part of an interesting visit indeed! Apart from that – nice campus with minutes into the city of Ottawa! I took the train from Montreal and back; it is a pleasant ride through Quebec and Ontario countryside. WiFi on board was down, so a few student questions had to wait until my return.

Last week of lectures ahead

Next week is the last week of lectures, but the weekly schedule will be busier than usual. Due to the holiday schedule I have added one lecture for each section in order to finish things properly. So instead of April 9, things will be done by April 11. Everything is prepared and set up, though – so no sweat.

Strategic learning sessions already wrapped up and I am looking forward to the comments regarding their helpfulness in understanding the lecture material! All exams are submitted (regular and alternate), so all I have to do is show up and be available for questions. It is really nice that the exam’s office takes care of everything – you have to hand things in early, but they take up quite a bit of the administrative load.

I have also been busy adding my latest results to my research lecture – the past couple of months were quite fruitful regarding data analysis and calculations, so there is quite a bit of new stuff to present. I have also set up a lecture about biosensors for intermediate analytical chemistry students, which was quite interesting to do, since some of these devices are already available on the market – e.g. the iStat analysis system used for clinical measurements. For students it is really nice to connect their theoretical knowledge with current applications.

I get a feel …

… that the semester is slowly drawing to a close. I started the last chapter in my CHEM-218 class – an introduction to spectroscopy (molecular, luminescence and a little bit of atomic spectroscopy) to prepare students for CHEM-312, the instrumental analysis course. I am confident that I will finish presenting the remaining material in time and in mid-April the final exam will be coming up.

I also work on the revision of another publication – not too much to do, so it will be under way soon. More news to follow, once it is out! I discussed my calculations from last week and checked them for consistency – all looks pretty good and the concentration estimates for selected VOC in air are quite robust.

Estimation of VOC concentration in air from snow data

I currently work on ways to estimate concentrations of selected VOCs in air from VOC concentrations obtained in snow. This would not only give me an idea of the impact of VOC stored in snow on their occurrence in air (for data with no air samples analysed) , but would also let me compare my air and snow results, where I have both available and how the data correlate with numerical calculations.

After looking around a bit in the literature I have done some calculations using Lei & Wania’s approach (2004) with sorption coefficients for selected species compiled by Roth et al. (2004). The parameter that I miss is the specific snow surface area (SSA), which I have not measured for the data set I currently work on. However, Legagneux et al. (2002) published an extensive list of SSA for different types of snow, which they describe using images and a verbal description.

Since I have the latter information available from my snow data (including checks with a light microscope on site) I am able to estimate the SSA for my snow samples. Uncertainty data is available as well. Now that the calculations are set-up, what I need to do is optimise the estimated parameter and compare calculated results with my own data and published studies.

Session on Environmental Analysis at ICASS 2008

I will be convening a session on

“Spectroscopic and Mass Spectroscopic Measurements of Environmental Samples”

at the upcoming ICASS conference (http://www.icass.ca) in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue in August 2008. If you would like to submit a contribution, oral or poster, I would encourage you to do so.

Here is a detailed session description:
“Spectrometric measurements are essential in the determination of analytes in complex matrices. This session will discuss recent progress in the measurement of environmental systems including the usage of advanced statistical analysis of spectral data.”

Busy week …

… on the teaching and research side of things!

  • The first assignment is in, but I am already almost done marking – things went quite smoothly. A few students asked for extensions and all I wait for is for these last assignments to come in. Midterms are also coming up the week after next (study break in between), but there will not be any “leftovers” for me to mark
  • The deadline for the proposal that I co-wrote with my former advisor is finally here and I was quite busy filling forms yesterday evening. I finally got my hands on a version of Acrobat that let me save the filled forms; it is a pain that you can’t do that with the reader, because with the budget and summaries,… to fill in there are usually changes to be made.

Next week is the study break!

What’s new on the research front?

Well – there are quite a few things going on. My teaching load is considerably lighter this semester, so I can tie up a few loose ends on my research.

  •  My draft about the snow work in Quebec is coming along that there is only a tiny section missing; the manuscript describes the determination of VOC concentrations in snow and from the data I would like to calculate sorption coefficients to estimate deposition from the atmosphere.
  • I co-author a proposal on bio-aerosols in snow that should get done next week, since the deadline is looming
  • I have fine-tuned my dossier apart from updates such as new publications, since I get a better and better idea, what I would like to do in the future

I might have to put things on the back-burner, when the first assignment comes in next week, but student numbers are down, since I have one fewer course to teach, so I am hopeful to make some considerable progress until the summer.

Marking exams … (and some poster feedback)

… and slowly there is an end in sight. Lecture 1 is done; lecture 2 is partly done. Compiling the marks takes a while – with all sorts of exemptions, medical notes,… to be taken care of. So I take some “homework” with me into the Christmas break :-( 

On a related note – a former co-worker has presented 2 posters for me at this fall’s AGU meeting in San Francisco – I could not go, because of my teaching commitments. He got interesting feedback for me and quite a few new contacts, so I am looking forward to his report to work on the comments.