Aircraft Investigations of Concentrations of Biological Particles over the UK

• Supervisors: Prof. Martin Gallagher (UMAN)
  Dr. Dave Topping (NCAS)
  Dr. J. Dorsey (NCAS)
  Prof. Andrew Morse (Liverpool)
  
• External Supervisors: Dr. J. Trembath, FAAM
  
  
• Contact:

  Prof. Martin Gallagher, martin.gallagher@manchester.ac.uk

• CASE Partner: Yes - FAAM-NCAS

Application deadline: 3 February 2017

Airborne biological particles, or bioaerosols, such as fungal spores, have caused disease outbreaks with increasing frequency, scale and severity over the last 50 years, mainly due to trade, travel, but also climate change. Fungal spore initiated diseases in particular are now thought to pose a demonstrable danger to global food security, biodiversity and ecosystem health. The projected increase in global spread of fungal spore initiated plant and animal diseases, demonstrated in recent global model studies, highlights the increasing need for improved monitoring and prediction of dispersion of these pathogens. The growing negative societal impact these pathogens will cause is now being realized. For example it was estimated in 2012 that fungal disease related infections alone, such as rice blast, soybean rust, wheat stem rust, corn smut and potato blight, destroyed over 125 million tonnes of these global food crops, which are particularly important to the developing world, Fischer et al. (2012). This and similar studies also highlighted that in 70% of cases where infectious disease caused an animal or plant extinction, a fungal species was actually the cause, and that this figure is projected to increase. To put this into perspective, the damage caused by fungi to rice, wheat and maize, costs global agriculture more than $60 billion per year, an amount that could feed 600 million people per year. In the USA, studies of just one impacted animal population will lead to increasing outbreaks of insect crop-pests, further adding to agricultural crop losses to the tune of $3.7 billion per year. Finally it has been estimated that tree loss and plant damage caused by fungal disease alone will lead to a potential biosphere uptake reduction of up to 580 million tonnes of CO₂, more than the total annual UK CO2 equivalent emissions, and which will likely contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The societal benefit of monitoring, predicting and limiting the spread of such diseases is clear and the development of practical long term continuous monitoring and discrimination of bioaerosols, using real-time airborne particle detection technology, is developing rapidly. Studies assimilating real-time single particle bioaerosol measurements have been recently demonstrated using test sites in Germany, Finland and France. Recent measurements using new real-time bioaerosol detection technology suggest previous emissions of bioaerosols, including fungal spores, may have been badly underestimated and that their impacts need to be re-evaluated. For example, primary biological particle concentrations, monitored with real-time technology over a full year in Germany, were shown to contribute at least 22%, on average, to the net atmospheric PM10 loading there, much higher than previously thought.

Given the recent global economic analyses of the costs arising from the impact of these plant and animal pathogens and the likely increases expected in future, one key factor has emerged that is limiting improvement of models to predict their emission and dispersal. This is the lack of good spatially and highly temporally resolved measurements, in particular vertically resolved observational databases to assess their long-range transport. Technology for real-time monitoring of primary biological aerosols is developing rapidly to the point where now quantifiable PM for fungal spores can be delivered for regulatory needs. In the near future, such technology will become common –place in pollution and climate monitoring networks. Like other surface based pollution monitoring network parameters, vertically resolved concentration data are needed for eventual emission model validation.

As a result of the development of new bioaerosol detection technology new hypotheses are being posed regarding their contribution to larger scale climate feedback, including contributions to warm temperature aerosol-cloud interactions, with potential impacts on regional hydrological cycles and ecosystem change, Morris et al. (2014). The sensitivity of these pathways to a changing climate for prediction of general human, animal and plant disease transmission, is now being included in global climate models. This candidate’s work will allow the UK to start to contribute to this new and exciting research area.

This project will use new instrumentation recently installed on the NERC FAAM research aircraft to conduct real-time airborne measurements of bioaerosol concentrations (e.g. fungal spores) around the UK. The goal will be to make the first such airborne study of the 3D bioaerosols concentrations over the UK since the early 1960’s using new instrument technology. The candidate will participate in aircraft studies to investigate in detail the seasonal changes of regional emissions of bioaerosols from the UK as well long range import of these particles into the UK. New real-time UVLIF instrumentation on the FAAM aircraft will be recorded and correlated with meteorological and trace gas species for air mass identification allowing for a range of detailed model applications to be undertaken associated with these pathogens with much greater confidence in their source regions. Our approach to using airborne sampling has been demonstrated many times for trace gases and anthropogenic aerosols and used to constrain and validate their emissions inventories to inform pollution models, so is well tried and tested. The new bioaerosol data will be used as input to NOAA HYSPLIT and UK Met Office Dispersion Models to assess the source and eventual impacts of these particles.

This is a CASE studentship with FAAM with additional funding supported by NCAS.

The aims of the project are to:

• Characterise the operation of the new real-time bioaerosol instrument on the FAAM aircraft in collaboration with staff at FAAM through a series of test flights.
• Contribute to aircraft projects flying over and around the UK to investigate seasonal changes in regional vertical and horizontal concentration gradients of key bioaerosols over the UK.
• Test assimilation of aircraft measured vertically and horizontally resolved primary biological particle concentration data within the NAME dispersion model.
• Use new in-house developed software tools  for discriminating different classes of bioaerosol particles to further analyse the collected data sets.
• There will also be opportunity to collect data with the new instrument on future international projects around the world where the FAAM aircraft will be deployed. 

The candidate will receive full training by staff at FAAM to operate on the FAAM research aircraft (Fig. 1) and other associated instruments on the FAAM research aircraft. Additional aerosol instruments and training will be provided by Manchester technical staff and in particular the bioaerosol spectrometer whose operation will need to be optimized for use on the aircraft at different altitudes. The candidate will attend a training course on use of the NAME Dispersion Model at the UK Met Office and Dr. Grant Allen will provide support and advice in its use at Manchester. Dr. Topping will provide support and training in the use of new software tools for analysis of the bioaerosol data products. The candidate will be expected to spend some time at FAAM (Cranfield) working on the new aircraft measurement system with Dr. Trembath to characterize the new instrument and will participate in and contribute to the regular meetings of the large and vibrant aerosol research teams in the Manchester Centre for Atmospheric Science. You will also benefit from the training and supervision in a range of analytical and programming fields by experienced University of Manchester supervisory teams which are offered by the University of Manchester as well having access to training courses provided by the Earth, Atmosphere and Ocean Doctoral Training Programme. 

This project will appeal to a candidate with an enthusiasm for making field measurements, is happy to fly on research aircraft in different parts of the world, and who has strong interests in cross-disciplinary science, including atmospheric aerosols, measurement technology, meteorology, data analysis and interpretation, as well as environmental biology and bio-geochemical feedbacks.

Fisher, Matthew C. and Henk, Daniel. A. and Briggs, Cheryl J. and Brownstein, John S. and Madoff, Lawrence C. and McCraw, Sarah L. and Gurr, Sarah J. Nature, 2012, 484:7392, 186-194, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature10947

Morris, C. E., Conen, F., Alex Huffman, J., Phillips, V., Pöschl, U. and Sands, D. C. (2014), Bioprecipitation: a feedback cycle linking Earth history, ecosystem dynamics and land use through biological ice nucleators in the atmosphere. Glob Change Biol, 20: 341–351. doi:10.1111/gcb.12447.

Twohy, C. H., McMeeking, G. R., DeMott, P. J., McCluskey, C. S., Hill, T. C. J., Burrows, S. M., Kulkarni, G. R., Tanarhte, M., Kafle, D. N., and Toohey, D. W.: Abundance of fluorescent biological aerosol particles at temperatures conducive to the formation of mixed-phase and cirrus clouds, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 16, 8205-8225, doi:10.5194/acp-16-8205-2016, 2016

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