BIG RED Ideas: David Billesbach

David Billesbach, Assistant Research Professor, Biological Systems Engineering
David Billesbach, Assistant Research Professor, Biological Systems Engineering

David Billesbach is an Assistant Research Professor in Biological Systems Engineering. As a climate change scientist, Dr. Billesbach has collected, measured and analyzed greenhouse gas emissions for nearly 25 years.

He defines data science as any research that generates or accumulates more than 10 Mbytes of data per day which must be further processed to yield meaningful results.

"My instrumentation generates and transfers up to 60 – 100 Mbytes of raw data per day from a number of remote field sites. These raw data sets are then processed to produce atmospheric trace gas fluxes (H2O, CO2, CH4, COS, etc.) and supporting ecosystem data. These processed data and those from hundreds of other sites are contributed to national and international archives where researchers can freely access and use them to synthesize atmospheric and ecosystem responses and to model global climate. In the future new sensors and remote sensing products (from satellites and aircraft) will increase the volume of data and its usefulness by allowing new and more detailed models to be developed."

Billesbach’s work has been vital to the Nebraska Sandhills and peat bogs in north-central Minnesota and central Saskatchewan. His current focus is the North Slope of Alaska and north-central Oklahoma in collaboration with the Department of Energy’s Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program, and AmeriFlux.

Billesbach received his PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Physics and Astronomy and currently works closely with scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

http://engineering.unl.edu/bse/david-billesbach/