Elizabeth Pattey facts for kids

Elizabeth Pattey is a leading scientist in Canada. She works at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), which is a government group that helps farmers and protects the environment. She leads a special lab in Ottawa that studies how the atmosphere and plants interact.

Her work helps improve how farming affects the environment across Canada. This is important for reaching goals set by the United Nations to fight climate change and for Canada's own Clean Air Act. Dr. Pattey has written more than 80 scientific papers. She is an expert in measuring how gases move in the air, using computer models, and studying things from far away, like with satellites.

About Elizabeth Pattey

Dr. Pattey has taught as a professor at Macdonald Campus of McGill University. She also helped check many Ph.D. projects for students in Canada and other countries.

Today, she is a research scientist at AAFC in Ottawa. She has led many big projects that use remote sensing. This includes the first project at AAFC that was funded by the Canadian Space Agency. She has also represented AAFC in important meetings with other government groups and at the Canadian Embassy.

Her Scientific Work

Dr. Pattey's current research focuses on finding better ways to measure gases that cause greenhouse gas emissions. These gases include nitrous oxide (N₂O), methane (CH₄), and carbon dioxide (CO₂). She also studies other air pollutants like ammonia and tiny particulate matter.

She was a pioneer in using a method called "relaxed eddy accumulation" to measure these gases. She has helped with international efforts to check computer models that predict greenhouse gas emissions. These models also help understand how ammonia gas escapes from farms. Her work also involves using remote sensing data to understand how plants grow in different soils.

In her research, she looks at how good farming practices can improve air quality. She also studies how changes in weather affect how well crops grow.

In other projects, she has measured how much crops grow and their total plant material (called biomass). She does this by looking at weather and soil conditions, using remote sensing, micrometeorology, and computer models. She has also measured greenhouse gas emissions from farms at different levels: from a single field, a whole farm, and even a large region. For this, she uses special air measurement tools and laser equipment. She also developed ways to use remote sensing data to guess how much crop a field will produce. This helps farmers make better decisions for their specific fields.

Dr. Pattey was also a key part of a big study called The Boreal Ecosystem – Atmosphere Study (BOREAS). During this study, she measured how carbon dioxide, methane, and isoprene gases moved in a forest site in Saskatchewan.

GreenCropTracker Tool

Dr. Pattey, along with Jiangui Liu, created a tool called GreenCropTracker. This tool helps make better computer models for showing how crops grow. It also helps get important information about farm crops.

GreenCropTracker is a software tool that can get crop information from a simple digital photo. You just take a picture over a crop field. The predictions from this tool help farmers understand what is happening in their fields. This allows them to manage their crops more effectively.

Pattey and Liu realized that a series of photos taken over time could show how crops are growing. They developed a special way to analyze these images. This method helps tell the difference between empty spaces and plant parts in a photo. They then put this image analysis method into GreenCropTracker.

GreenCropTracker can be used to study crop growth in test plots and fields. It helps scientists see how climate changes affect crops. It also provides important ground data for getting crop information from remote sensing. The tool also checks if crop growth models are working correctly. It helps combine what's happening on the ground with larger weather models.

This software has been tested on corn, wheat, and soybean crops. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations uses it. About 50 countries have asked for it because it gives fast and cheap information about crops. You can learn more about it here: GreenCropTracker.

Awards and Recognition

Dr. Pattey has received many awards for her important work:

• She was chosen as a Fellow of the Canadian Society of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (CSAFM). This was for all her contributions to studying weather in farming and forests.
• In 2002, she received the Gerbier Mumm International Award for scientific excellence from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
• In 1997, she received the Graham Walker Memorial Award for excellence in Agrometeorology from the Canadian Society of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (CSAM).
• She was named Chair of a special team for the World Meteorological Organization – Commission of AgroMeteorology (WMO CAgM). This team focused on measuring gas movement in agriculture.
• In 2018, she won the Andrew Thomson Prize in Applied Meteorology from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. This was for her long-time leadership and big contributions to agricultural meteorology.
• In 2020, she received the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Biometeorology from the American Meteorological Society. This award recognized her pioneering work in developing systems to measure air movement near the ground. These systems help measure tiny particles and gases in the air.