This article, by Zach Thomas, is part of a series highlighting members of the Office of Sustainability’s Experts Database. In a collaboration with instructor Hannah Monroe’s course, LSC 561: Writing Science for the Public, students interviewed campus sustainability experts and produced short feature stories.
As the world makes plans to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate, Ankur Desai, head of the Ecometeorology Lab at UW–Madison, constructs puzzles from pieces of local biological and atmospheric data to evaluate how well these plans will actually work. Desai applies sophisticated models to assess the plans’ implementation, piecing together local measurements of water, carbon, and heat exchanges to develop global models of climate change and environmental intervention. 
Governments and businesses around the world are making their own climate change mitigation plans, and the due diligence to verify these plans is becoming a standalone industry — with a major role for researchers like Desai.
“There’s been a lot of discussions with nonprofit and industry partners about to what extent we can make more reliable flux measurements for things like carbon sequestration,” Desai said. “Essentially, there’s a lot of snake oil in this industry … [and] there are major corporations that are willing to fork out a lot of money to be able to say they’re green … and being able to provide the science to back that up is going to become a growing part of the role that universities are going to have to play.”
Providing this precise science requires great data and lots of coordination. To bridge the scale between a single leaf and the entire earth system, scientists around the world operate flux towers that record carbon, water, and heat exchanges, measuring the particles and humidity in the air, the light reflected off the land, and temperature changes. They coordinate to publish this data to standards that allow any scientist to use it to conduct their own experiments. Within this framework, Desai operates his own flux towers and researches the mechanics of ecosystems and meteorology.
Desai’s research spans all geographic scales, from individual agricultural projects to international climate change mitigation. His climate models have been included, along with other climate models around the world, in the International Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports to help policymakers understand the dangers of and solutions to climate change.
More tangibly, Desai helps farmers nearby to evaluate the environmental impacts of their projects. A Baraboo dairy and wheat farm run by the USDA uses two of Desai’s flux towers to better understand its own carbon and methane emissions. Desai’s postdoctoral researcher, Susan Wiesner, budgeted the entire life cycle emissions life cycle of the farm, counting everything from pond methane to the cows themselves to determine additional opportunities for carbon sequestration. These opportunities can be adopted by dairy farms widely, should governments or businesses want to offset their emissions.
Beyond emissions, Desai recently drew on new data from flux towers to advise the Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers Association about its water management practices. He updated multiple assumptions the group uses frequently to plan irrigation practices, such as the regeneration rate of wells, so it can better weather dry years.
Desai understands that his work is complex, and that it can be difficult to communicate his research to the people it can help. His solution is to turn his science into a game. He calls one highly technical experiment, which evaluates how theories about biological influences on atmospheric processes are measured by flux towers, the Chequamegon Heterogeneous Ecosystem Energy-balance Study Enabled by a High-density Extensive Array of Detectors, or: CHEESEHEAD. 
“I’ve been involved in enough experiments and I’ve reviewed enough experiments that having a catchy acronym is everything,” Desai said. “You need good science and solid science behind these, but it really helps having shorthands to talk about complex scientific topics. Using acronyms that sometimes can bring a smile to people’s faces is not the worst thing, right?”