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Israel Lopez Coto (Assoc)
Israel López-Coto, Ph.D., is a physicist in the Engineered Fire Safety Group of the Fire Research Division of the Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology working for the NIST's Greenhouse Gas Program. Dr. López-Coto research interests are meteorological modeling and atmospheric pollutant transport simulation along with greenhouse gas inversion modeling and source quantification.
Dr. López-Coto received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from University of Seville, Spain, in 2004, two Masters of Science degrees from University of Huelva, Spain, in 2006 and 2011, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in environmental science from University of Huelva, Spain, 2011. As part of his doctoral thesis entitled "Spatial and Temporal Variability of Radon Sources and Concentrations in the Low Atmosphere," he studied the contribution of an anthropogenic source of radon gas on the atmospheric concentration of this radioactive gas in the near by cities by means of high resolution weather simulations coupled to atmospheric dispersion in several episodes.
After his PhD, he worked at Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Germany) as a visiting researcher in collaboration with Dr. Christoph Gerbig, and was funded by the European Science Foundation. This project was focused on radon as a tracer for transport and mixing processes in the WRF-Chem (Weather Research and Forecasting) model. It involved coupling a high resolution radon flux model with the transport in WRF-Chem and testing the simulation results against experimental radon concentration data from atmospheric network stations across Europe.
During his post-doc project, "high-resolution and high-fidelity solar forecasting demonstration for grid integration," at University California San Diego, his principal aim was to develop and implement an accurate operational solar resource forecasting system in Southern California. It was based on an ensemble of physical WRF configurations selected through an extensive sensitivity analysis and a post processing system to blend the ensemble results.
Dr. López-Coto has several publications in peer-reviewed journals and contributions to national and international meetings. His efforts at NIST have focused on developing methodologies and software tools that are required for estimating and evaluating the flux of greenhouse gases from urban domains. Specifically, using Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) coupled with Lagrangian particle dispersion models (STILT) in a Bayesian framework to estimate the emissions flux from urban domains as part of the NIST Greenhouse Gas Program.