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By Dan Rahn
Monique Leclerc searches for the words for a moment, then announces, “I need the white  board.” Quickly cleaning a nearby board, she begins to draw.
The marker is almost inkless, leaving only faint marks. But Leclerc moves on, intently explaining her complex science. She can see her images perfectly. And before long, her visitor can, too. Her vision is contagious.
“I study the mixing and diffusion of gases in the atmospheric boundary layer,” Leclerc says. She illustrates with her magic marker her particular emphasis: the region nearest the ground, where plants interact strongly with the atmosphere.
“I do basic work,” she says. But her discussion of the many ways her research can be applied soon belies the simplicity of her statement.
To most people, air quality is subjective. But Leclerc’s evolving science is explaining ethereal space in hard numbers. She uses tracer and atmospheric-transport modeling techniques, for instance, to study environmental controls on carbon sequestration. Then she uses similar tools to evaluate air-quality measurements in Georgia.
Leclerc’s labors emanate from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Science’s Lab for Atmospheric and Environmental Physics in Griffin. But in a sense, her “lab” is as far-flung as all outdoors. It is wherever the grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Agency and the Georgia Research Alliance take her.
In a pine forest near Gainesville, Fla., with a DOE grant, she’s studying the movement of gases within and just above the forest canopy. Her goal is to give scientists who measure atmospheric emissions a quantitative way to locate where specific gases are coming from and where they’re settling.
The tools needed to generate such data are complicated, rare and expensive. Her instruments are often designed to her specifications and most often measure fluctuations of gases and air velocity 10 times per second.
Leclerc uses computer models to predict the diffusion of gases in the atmosphere. These models generate massive amounts of data and require intensive computation. They’re often run on supercomputers. But the GRA and other partners enabled her to buy a minicomputer and run her models in the field. She then takes physical measurements to verify the predictions, releasing a tracer compound (SF6) and measuring the tracer at various atmospheric points.
In another study, she’s tackling a fundamental problem her counterparts encounter worldwide. As scientists measure nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, methane and other gases at surface, tower-top, airplane and satellite levels, the missing links between the levels become glaring.
“Sometimes the differences between the levels are as large as 300 percent,” Leclerc says. “Our study is an attempt to integrate the data from the different levels.” NASA, the NSF and the DOE all are vitally concerned with Leclerc’s research.
Working with scientists in worldwide networks, Leclerc is widely known. She is an editor of three major journals and the incoming vice-president of the International Society of Biometeorology. She serves on many international committees and is often invited to speak at international conferences.
But she wants to narrow the focus of her next studies. “I want to spend more time on the interaction of gases within the canopy itself,” she says.
The focus of her energetic study, you see, is not only as wide as the world but as vital as your next breath.
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