Robbert P.J. Moonen (PhD)

MSc. Robbert P.J. Moonen is a PhD student at Utrecht University under the Cloudroots NWO grant that Jordi Vilà and Thomas Röckmann received. He has gained his master’s degree at Wageningen University where he specialized in Meteorology and Air Quality. His main interests are the various turbulent exchanges between the land surface and the atmosphere, where he focusses on direct measurements of such fluxes. To this end, he uses tools like the Eddy-Covariance technique and Scintillometer method. Additionally, he is getting acquainted with high frequency measurements of CO₂ and H₂O isotopologues using laser spectroscopy. His ultimate goal to separate the respiration components from the vegetation and the soil at very short timescales by making flux measurements of these isotopologues. Such information will help to advance our understanding of plant dynamics and improve the parameterization of vegetation and soils in model simulations.