Torn heads the Carbon Project for DOE's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program (ARM), a team of eight scientists plus support staff based at Berkeley Lab who gather data at ARM's Southern Great Plains site in Oklahoma. Equipped with an instrument suite designed by Torn, this location has been called "possibly the best-instrumented site for regional carbon studies in the world." The resulting data, bridging scales from individual crops to the middle of the continent and from the ground surface to the stratosphere, have led to improvements in regional and global computer climate models.
In studies sponsored by the Office of Science, Torn has assessed DOE strategies for carbon sequestration in soils by studying the lifetime of fine roots, plant matter decomposition rates, and the persistence of organic carbon in the soil in temperate forests. Using measurements of carbon-14 and other isotopes, Torn has overturned previous assumptions about the amount of carbon pumped underground by root growth.
Since 2001, Torn has been head of Berkeley Lab's Climate Change and Carbon Management Program, coordinating the efforts of climate researchers in the Lab's Earth Sciences Division with members of the Engineering and Environmental Energy Technology Divisions and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Under Torn's initiative, program members realized the first regional climate and terrestrial ecosystem supercomputer model that couples the land surface to the mesoscale; as a consequence, Berkeley Lab's climate-change simulations have achieved unprecedented fine resolution.
Torn's previous research has taken her around the world, from Hawaiian rainforests to Alaskan tundra and from the Sierra Nevada to the Russian steppe. She maintains collaborations in Russia, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands,
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Contact: Paul Preuss
paul_preuss@lbl.gov
510-486-6249
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
9-Sep-2004