Field of Dreams … and Solar Panels
September 12, 2024
“When it doesn’t rain, the Morey Solar Field in Middleton glimmers with dew. Well over two dozen rows of solar panels span this field, gazing up at an angle toward the sun during the early morning and whirring occasionally as they rotate into noon sunlight.
This field is where sophomore Liz Sanchez Garcia collects her data each week, setting up flags in both open sections of the field and in the shade beneath the solar panels. They mark the spots where she usually installs her equipment — a gas analysis device shaped like a backpack, a clear chamber she built herself, a weather meter and her laptop into which she feeds live data of the changing gas concentrations in the chamber. Sometimes a plane takes off from the Middleton Municipal Airport a few hundred yards away from the field.
Sanchez Garcia is studying computer science and environmental studies. She’s spending her summer with the Letters & Science Summer of Excellence in Research (LASER) program. It’s an eight-week undergraduate program in which students within a wide range of STEM majors conduct research on their project of choice, mentored by UW–Madison faculty or staff members.
Sanchez Garcia conducts research under the mentorship of Professor Ankur Desai, the chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS). But much of her work is also done in the company of other lab members in Desai’s Ecometeorology Lab, where students of all levels contribute to research on the ways climate changes or weather changes both influence and are influenced by ecosystems.”
Read the full College of Letters and Science article by Kai Wen Li, August 27, 2024