What if we were to throw in getting up close and personal with some atmospheric flux fields?

Meet University of Wollongong Associate Professor Andrew Zammit-Mangion, based in NSW's Illawarra, who is here to tell you statistics is plenty exciting.

On Friday he headed to the USA where he will be honoured at the American Statistical Association's joint meetings in Washington, D.C. with the 2022 ENVR Early Investigator Award for his work in environmental modelling and analysis.

Associate Professor Zammit-Mangion is a member of the Centre for Environmental Informatics at UOW's National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA).

He said the work enables him to cross multiple fields - he fuses mathematics, computer science and statistics to model complex environmental phenomena - including the movement and eventual destination of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, land and water, and the changes in ice in Antarctica due to climate change.

"I developed a framework [which] is still being used today for analysing what Antarctica is doing in terms of sea level rise, trying to see where the ice is melting, where it is thickening, at what rates as well," he said.

"Hopefully if we get that right, if we understand what is going on today, that will help us forecast what is going to happen in the future as well.

"We use very sophisticated statistical methods and physics-based models to try and tease out what we're actually seeing in the data."

Dr Zammit-Mangion is also is a member of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) science team, which allows access to the results, and scientists, from the satellite which takes readings of carbon dioxide at thousands of points throughout its orbit of the Earth.

This is the second iteration of the satellite - the first failed to reach orbit upon release from a rocket - so its name is, rather appropriately for a carbon dioxide study, OCO2.

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He uses data from the satellite to work out where carbon dioxide (CO2) is going - whether moving or being absorbed by land or sea - in the climate today in a project with described as 'watching the Earth breathe'.

"It looks down from space and works out how much CO2 is 'below me' at this point in time," he said.

"From this date we try to see where was the CO2 emitted, and where is it going - a very hard problem.

"It's a no-brainer that CO2 is increasing at alarming rates. You don't need to put a satellite in space to see that - although when you look at the satellite data it's pretty obvious. Fossil fuels are the main contributor to that, there's little doubt about that.

"The question is, what is the Earth doing? The Earth's response to increasing temperatures [is] the ocean starts to absorb more CO2, you get more trees growing which can absorb more CO2. But we don't really know how much it absorbs, and how much the oceans are absorbing.

"So one of the biggest challenges we've been working on for many years is trying to work out how the biosphere, and the oceans, and absorbing CO2, and how that is reacting to net positive fossil fuel emissions.

"How is the Earth reacting to that?"