4 Ecosystems, weather, and environment

It might not take a rocket scientist to realize that maintaining our environment - on a global, regional, local and even personal-living-space scale – is essential to our well-being; however, it was indeed rocket science that brought us stunning images of the earth seen from a distance. These images accentuated the uniqueness of the planet we inhabit. Physics helps us make wise choices about living in earth-bound environments, helps us model behaviors and detect changes, and gives us tools to be resilient as individuals and as societies to disruptive changes. Dynamical systems theory models ecosystem behavior in terms of fundamental exchanges of matter and energy; this provides ways to anticipate “tipping points” where sudden, large changes can create a catastrophic disruption.

As human population concentrates more into urban centers, improved understanding is needed of physical processes like heat flow, contaminant transport, and air and moisture exchanges within and around buildings. Physical infrastructures can support the adroit use of biological systems like urban forests, wildlife and roof gardens and help with the detection and removal of pathogens and pollutants. As cities expand into surrounding territories, the need arises to use measurement systems, models, tools, and machines to manage the urban/wildland interface – preventing destructive fires, preserving natural spaces and regional biodiversity, mitigating the disruption and destabilization of landforms, etc. Both urban and agricultural regions depend on good maintenance of balanced ecosystems, fair distribution of natural resources, and robust adaptation to local and regional scale variations in microclimate.

Meanwhile, the earth depends in many ways on large sparsely settled ecosystems, ranging from rainforests to the oceans to alpine regions to the arctic tundra. We strive to invent ways to prevent and/or mitigate major disruptions to these environments, such as the dispersion of plastics large spills of oil in the ocean. We greatly need to improve our models and understanding of how such regions maintain a planetary balance of biodiversity, atmospheric composition, temperature control, protection from harmful radiation, etc.

This of course blends into the gamut of physics-based activities to model the weather for short- and medium-term prediction, using well-designed measurement networks, and from this base to make essential long-term models and forecasts of climate change. We hope that our understanding and measurement can soon assure us that we are implementing the correct measures to ensure that the earth remains a healthy home over the long-term for all forms of life.