The following is a transcript of an episode of Plugged in to Public Health, the University of Iowa College of Public Health’s student podcast. This is part 2 of host Lauren Lavin’s conversation with Dr. Jun Wang about his work in atmospheric science and implications for public health. Wang’s lab at the University of Iowa is developing innovative technologies for satellite remote sensing and low-cost environmental sensors to better understand and combat challenges like wildfires, air quality, and climate change. This episode was published on Nov. 13, 2024.

Lauren Lavin:
Welcome back to the second part of our conversation with Dr. Jun Wang. In the first episode, Dr. Wang introduced us to his incredible journey in atmospheric sciences, along with the groundbreaking work his lab is doing at the University of Iowa. Today we’ll delve deeper into the innovative technologies his team is developing, including satellite remote sensing and low-cost environmental sensors. He will also share how these advancements are helping us better understand and combat the challenges of wildfires, air quality, and climate change. We’ll also explore some of the exciting interdisciplinary projects his lab is leading, which aim to support rural communities and address climate change at the neighborhood scale. My name is Lauren Lavin, and this is Plugged Into Public Health, a student-run podcast from the University of Iowa College of Public Health. So let’s get plugged into public health. Okay, talking about some of these components a little bit more specifically. So the satellite remote sensing, does your lab create the sensors or do you program?

Jun Wang:
We don’t not create satellite sensors. We put the requirement for engineering to design the satellite sensors. We suggest how many angles the satellite will be looking at, what the wavelengths they should be designed for. We basically put a requirement to say, this is what we want, and then in a year we’ll come back to say, okay, well you’re a scientist, what’s your personal wish list. Guess what? We cannot do that with current technology. This is the best thing I can do. If I do this, how much you more you can lose sacrifice for science? Would you rather do push in a pool until we finalize the best instrument to serve our scientific purpose. So we don’t make satellites. We simulate their operations in the computer.

Lauren Lavin:
With that, how has the satellite remote sensing impacted people’s ability to research air quality weather and climate change? Has it improved their ability to do that?

Jun Wang:
Let’s give you one example. For example, say that you’ve carried a camera in space. There better be like you carry your iPhone into space but take pictures. But by just look one picture, you know, oh, these are trees, there are smoke layers, things like that. But you got thousands, thousands of those pictures. There is no way by just looking eyes that you can look to all of them. So we design algorithms to extract critical information that is relevant for weather and climate prediction. For example, we designed novel algorithms that we can extract the layer information, the height information of smoke layer from those images. So, all of a sudden, instead of a two-dimensional picture, you got three-dimensional information. And why that is important because if the layer of the smoke particles are way above the surface, then they’re not going to touch down the surface. So the air quality will be good, where we shouldn’t worry about it.

But if the simple air is very close to the service, then our air quality will be affected by that. Previously, if by only looking at two-dimensional image, you don’t get that kind of information. But we design algorithm using physics, using the spectrum, and together with the models and together with computing, we are able to extract that information. And now we know where that simple air is located in the vertical. Then we put in the model to predict, are they going to reach to, for example, Washington D.C today? Are they going to touch down the Washington D.C or cover a layer over there or they’re actually pass over up in the sky into Atlantic Ocean? So that information is one step further because you know where are they, and you can predict what can happen.
Another example is a fire. Fire had to be slurring or could be flaming, right? Flaming part of the fire is very important because the flaming generally is occurring in the atmosphere and the wind carries that flame to the nearby trees. That’s where the fire lines get propagated and the fire grows. So for firefighters, they are looking at which part of that fire is flaming and they want to bottom that flaming. So we designed an algorithm to look at that kind of fire lines, by using what? By using fire lines we can see from space from satellites. So at night time fire light can be seen from satellites. So we design algorithm for that to detect the fire lines. And then in that way, how the fire parameter will be growing and the firefighters can go there to help them to plan the resources they have to mitigate the fire to suppress the fire. This then in the western U.S, the fire is huge and guess what? Because of global warming, we’re seeing more and more nighttime fires.

So instead of the firefighter normally say, well, in the nighttime cools down, the fire will stop. We work more on the daytime, we work much less in nighttime. Now the reality is they can work around the clock. So the more model they know, we heard the fire line flaming part is, the better for them to plan their resources, legal resources to get these resources to maximize their effort to suppress the fire. So those are two examples I give you. And because we know voluminous motoring, we better estimate how much CO2 is still out of the sphere, how much particles are still out of sphere, and that better prediction of air quality. So those things all together come together because we have satellite sensing. So those are two examples, just give you a flavor of how things work.

Lauren Lavin:
Those are great examples. And I feel like every year we hear about more and more wildfires and how destructive they are. So anything that can be used to help mitigate those or stop them faster is obviously very beneficial. With those sensors, are there different levels of cost with them? Are there low cost sensors and high cost sensors or are they all kind of the same?

Jun Wang:
Some sensors that going to the space, they are seven in NASA’s common knowledge. They’re what they call different classes of site emissions. That’s class C, There’s a class D. So different classes come with different price range. The bigger ones is one satellite can carry multiple sensors and those are on the order of billions of dollars.

Lauren Lavin:
Oh my gosh.

Jun Wang:
With new technology, cheaper launch cost, many of the satellites would cost smart satellites. These are on the order of $100 million solar emission to $200 million.

Lauren Lavin:
That’s nothing, right?

Jun Wang:
That’s still huge. But I have seen some of the smaller ones cost about maybe $30 million, but it’s getting cheaper. Just give you an idea of that. These are satellite sensors. In my lab on another side of thing actually didn’t look cost features to look at the weather and the climate at the ground, but we can talk about later if you’re interested.

Lauren Lavin:
No, I’d love to talk about the low cost sensors. So your lab is developing these low cost environmental sensors and they’re different than the satellite sensors.

Jun Wang:
They are different than the satellite sensors.

Lauren Lavin:
Can you explain them?

Jun Wang:
Okay. Those are called something called Internet of Things, IOT. Those sensors are very, very small and they’re low power and you can program them to make them smart. So in the last couple of years, we designed a sensor called, but I stands for I one made, so you got the iCanopy, right? You have iPhone, you have iTunes, you have iPad. Now you’ve got iCanopy. Just remember that, iCanopy. So iCanopy is a system that can measure the air temperature, air humidity, and the pressure a two meter altitude, and then we have a tube that carries the wire and measure the soil temperature and the soil moisture. It’s all design and manufactured here in the University of Iowa.

Lauren Lavin:
Wow.

Jun Wang:
The integration of the PCBs, the chips and all that is actually manufactured by the [inaudible 00:08:27] and then we have students here to manufacture them. Those sensors, this will them cost about 250 to three bucks, but they are powered by solar panels and we design a phone wire such that if the power is low for a couple of days in the winter time, they’re not quite much of a solar, the sensor is intelligent enough to lower its frequency to sample the data to save the power. Opposite is true in the summer you have too much solar energy coming in, we increase the frequency of sampling to use more power.
There was also cases where your Wi-Fi, your home Wi-Fi maybe is down for one day or two, we don’t want our sensor to keep connect your Wi-Fi and lose the energy. So there will key your sensor for a couple of times. If not worked, then wait for six hours. So make it very intelligent. So we have iCanopy sensors that measures air and the soil. Sometimes in the urban areas, we don’t want to measure too much soil because it’s all concrete. Then we just have air component we call iAir, iCanopy and iAir sensors.

Lauren Lavin:
That’s great. So do you sell these sensors to companies or is this for research purposes?

Jun Wang:
These are all funded by the federal government, by USDA and now by NSF. We basically share the sensors with any citizens who want to use them, allow them to put it in their backyard. So we call it the citizen science because the more citizen world, we know more about the weather in different places, we know how the weather look like, how the temperature varies in different neighborhoods. It’s get to something encouraging environmental justice kind of side of the cities, right? Some poor neighborhoods don’t have too much canopy. The air temperature in the summer could be much hotter then we see a not high-end neighborhood where you got a lot of trees, you got a lot of lawns, and all that. We see the heat index changing by 30 degrees-

Lauren Lavin:
Wow.

Jun Wang:
… like Omaha for the same day because they live in different neighborhoods. So by monitoring those, we’re getting the information that we never had before but this information can be used by the city council, by the townships to say where we planning them. Maybe I can put more shelters in this neighborhood that they needed because on one hand, this neighborhood, they don’t have resources for AC. But on the other hand, their environment also is not helping them to have a cooler temperature. So those are the place of the need of our resources. We can provide that intelligence for the decision makers to see how they should allocate their resources.

Lauren Lavin:
That’s so interesting that the centers can help with something like environmental justice. That’s obviously very important and something that we probably don’t think about all that often.

Jun Wang:
Right.

Lauren Lavin:
Moving into climate change, I know you touched on it just a little bit. One, because it can be a contested topic, is the climate changing? And two, how does your research help us better understand the impact of climate change?

Jun Wang:
Climate is definitely changing. No matter what data we look at them, the temperature is definitely increasing in global outreach. They definitely have more fires. We had a study for just probably last December. We feel in the last 20 years, the fire has increased in intensity and frequency, and as a result it lead into poor air quality in the western part of the United States. So if you put the epinology statistics into your equation, we find that the increase of fire has lead to the increase of the loss of the lives on the order of 600 people per year.

Lauren Lavin:
Wow.

Jun Wang:
That rate is 600 per year in the last 10 years in the western part of the United States. This does not mean that individual life is lost because of fire pollution. We’re talking about statistically, if you assume the average people’s life span is 79 years and then you look to fixed motor, if you exposure to higher pollution, your lifespan may be shortened by one year or two, and then you multiply that shorten one year or two with the population, then you divide by 79 effectively speculates how many people’s life will be lost. 600. So in comparison, how many life is lost directly due to the fire damage per year in the United States? Less than 100. Let’s get this number right. So the air pollution, because they’re spread out by air, that impact on our quality of life is very significant. So we get back to climate change. We also see more after of the norm weather patterns. In the wintertime, or the summer, temperature can go up to 56 degrees.

And literally I live in the Grand Plains for probably about 17 years. Like this year, this wintertime, literally you have four seasons of clothes in the wintertime. Generally one day got 50, 60 degrees, you wear a pants outside, another day got too cold, you wear to clothes. You literally have everything, four seasons of the things not in your closet but in your couch. So those things definitely are changing. And my research, for example, to better to study all basically there’s a particle, the small particles, how the greenhouse gases, how they’re distributing in the atmosphere, and then from there we want to understand how they impact on the long-term climate change.

But if you getting a lot of smoke in the air, then your surface temperature actually will cooling down because you are blocking a lot of radiation reaching the surface. But is that good? Probably not, because in many ways you got a lot of poor air quality and also those smoke particles can deposit into the plant that affects their food solutions. So air pollution so you have dust particles, if that leaves very dirty, they cannot get the sunlight to grow. So these things all matters and we are trying to build a solid debate to understand how this fires affects climate change.

Lauren Lavin:
If you had a suggestion, what are some of the solutions to mitigating climate change?

Jun Wang:
That’s a very good question. I would just say the sun is shining to injecting some particles into what we call stratosphere about 10 kilometer above the surface. So imagine if we inject quite a bit of the very bright particles over there, it will take two or three years for them to come down to the surface. On top of it, they’re shining a fraction of sunlight back to space rather than coming into the surface. Well, to be also very cautious because we don’t fully understand the model of nature. If you want looses [inaudible 00:15:34], once you change that, there may be some unknown processes that we have not thought of maybe have other worst consequences. So we have to be very careful about that. That’s where we have to study more about that.
I would say is the best way to mitigate climate change that we know that we can do on our own is try to mitigate the emission of the greenhouse gases.

Be more reliant on renewable energy, less on fossil fuel. That part we can do. Be more aware to be environmentally friendly. If today a temperature like this, maybe you don’t need to turn your AC, save some energy. We can do bit by bit to mitigate climate change and certainly nationwide, this a challenging global effort to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions around the planet and everywhere. And you need the data, you need to put a science and the technology there to say, well, we have a good understanding. Those are the objects of data and how we work together to share the vision, to cut our emissions in different countries, to better understand climate for future. Those things need science and technologies there. So I would say we are slowly getting there, I think there are more and more consensus that we want to mitigate climate change and things like that there.

Lauren Lavin:
Are some countries more responsible for climate change than other countries or some of the pollution that impacts it?

Jun Wang:
That part is very difficult to pinpoint which countries, which area, and which year, things like that because the earth’s of the system is very complex. And then CO2 or the greenhouse gases can be in the atmosphere. Once it’s emitted in average can be in atmosphere on the order of 71 years. We’re talking about the emissions since the industrial or how the greenhouse gases has been, affects climate change, how the humidity has been. So it’s very difficult to pinpoint that. There are things we didn’t know, which is good is a forest. Forest can suck up a lot of the CO2, become biomass. There are a lot of ways that we can reduce the CO2 emissions by using electric cars, by using renewable energy, by using other form of energy. There are also a lot of ways by being thrifty, better planning of using water and natural resources. So I would say it is better to think how to work together to mitigate that rather than to say, well, which one? I want to be very constructive, I would say.

Lauren Lavin:
Yeah, rather than pointing fingers, it’s better to be-

Jun Wang:
Yes. Right.

Lauren Lavin:
That is a great way to put it. You gave us so much great information, we’re nearing our last question now. What are the next big questions or challenges that you and your lab hope to address in atmospheric and environmental sciences going forward?

Jun Wang:
I just want to share with you one of the projects recently just funded by NSF. It involves about 10 faculty in the University of Iowa from four colleges.

Lauren Lavin:
Wow.

Jun Wang:
Together with probably another 10 faculty from three other universities. So we are trying to study then help rural communities to manage severe weather and climate change at the neighborhood scale. So we’ll have a collaboration between Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Arkansas. Now you think about these four states, they are more or less geographically neighboring each other. They kind of one way another with another. Therefore, the air definitely move around in those four states, and this is the first time we’re collaborating to using sensors, iCanopy, iAir to study the temperature in the soil. In those four states, we’ll collect the data and look the neighborhood, the rural neighborhood. Because I would say rural communities are the ones that are disproportionately affected by climate change. On one hand, the lack of resources like big cities, and on the other hand their economic backbone is actually agriculture. So they’re relying much more on the weather. How the weather affects their crop yield, how the climate change affects them.
On one hand, they lack the resources to mitigate, on the other hand, their economy relying a lot of climate, how the climate can change, affect their economy. So we want to put some sensors there. And in the past, we really don’t know how the climate is changing or temperature look like either rural neighborhood because most weather stations I look at it in the urban areas. So now we’re going to actually have, for the first time, we’re not going to measure them in the neighborhood, in the rural community, but also in the farmland. We’re going to put a sensor in the corn field, measure the soil temperature, air temperature in the soil. Those things has not been very done. The observation in the past are very limited. So we’re going to use this data to better predict the weather change.

And then on top of it, we’re also going to bring the primary prediction motor output, and together with the sensor information, we’re going to say, okay, in the next 10 years, the climate change will lead to temperature in this neighborhood, temperature change by how much. So we’ll be able to bring the climate prediction used to be a very, very causal resolution on the order of 50 to 80 miles, not getting neighborhood scale. So that have a tangible deliveries about how the weather and the climate is going to change to the citizens that actually live there. So that fear is tangible because data is measured in my backyard. They bring more fidelity because in network, that’s a center there. That’s in my backyard, the temperature measured. So they can have more objectives of data with more fidelity, more trustworthy data to them. So we try to engage them more, help them to better plan for the future as climate and weather continue to change.

Lauren Lavin:
Wow. Well, it sounds like you guys are absolutely filling a need and doing something that will have a tangible impact on some of the minorities in American society. With that, thank you so much for taking time out of your day. This was such an informative discussion and I think we touched on so many topics that our listeners will enjoy hearing. So I really appreciate this. Thank you, Dr. Wang.

Jun Wang:
Thank you. Lauren, it’s my great pleasure.

Lauren Lavin:
Thank you for joining us for the second half of this engaging discussion with Dr. Jun Wang. Today we explored how Dr. Wang’s lab is pushing the boundaries of environmental research, the use of satellite technology, low-cost sensors, and community-focused projects, his insights into the future of atmospheric science and the importance of data-driven solutions for rural communities. Highlight how interdisciplinary collaboration can make a tangible difference in our fight against climate change. We hope you enjoyed this two-part series and gained a new appreciation for complexities of our atmosphere and the innovative work being done to protect it. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for more enlightening conversations in the weeks ahead.

This episode was hosted and written by Lauren Lavin and be produced by Lauren Lavin. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health, and be sure to subscribe to the show. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at CPH-gradambassadoruiowa.edu. This episode is brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.