Tag: Atmospheric Chemistry and Carbon

ESSIC / GEOL Professor James Farquhar is a co-author of a newly released study published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper entitled “Biological regulation of atmospheric chemistry en route to planetary oxygenation,” explores emerging evidence that a methane-derived organic haze was a large contributing factor associated with the Great Oxidation Event.  During the global scale phenomena that occurred over 2 billion years …

Friday, 11 November 2016

A new study from scientists Jungbin Mok and Zhanqing Li, Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) University of Maryland, and Nickolay Krotkov, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, is focusing on the impacts of brown carbon from biomass burning on ultraviolet (UV) radiation and atmospheric pollutants, which could lead to improved air quality models and help ameliorate potential health hazards such as suppression of the immune system and skin cancer. The paper is being released in

Work by Anand Ramanathan and Jianping Mao of ESSIC as part of the NASA Goddard CO2 Sounder lidar instrument team was presented at the 12th International Workshop for Greenhouse Gas Measurements from Space (IWGGMS), held in Kyoto, Japan from June 7-9. Highlights including results from the recent NASA ASCENDS airborne campaign in California and Nevada which showed 3x higher precision in column CO2 measurements, simultaneous column water vapor measurements, and the …

ESSIC / AOSC Professor Zhanqing Li is a co-author of a recently released paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which details new methods for determining cloud-base updraft speeds and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) concentrations.   Both of these components are key factors in quantifying the microphysical, precipitation, and radiative effects of aerosols at a global scale, something researchers had yet to accomplish due to ineffective and …

Congratulations to Ross Salawitch (AOSC / CHEM / ESSIC) and his graduate students Daniel Anderson (AOSC) and Julie Nicely (CHEM), along with AOSC's Russell Dickerson and Timothy Canty, whose research paper, “A pervasive role for biomass burning in tropical high ozone/low water structures,” was recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Based on observations from two aircraft missions, satellite data and a variety of models, the researchers showed that fires …

ESSIC’s Ross J. Salawitch, a professor in the UMD Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Science, co-authored a study on climate change and atmospheric chemistry that received a mention in the Dec. 3 issue of Nature. “The changing ozone depletion potential of N2O in a future climate” by Laura Revell (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich) finds that atmospheric changes could make nitrous oxide twice as destructive to ozone at the end of the 21st century as it was …

ESSIC Researchers Jianping Mao and Anand Ramanathan were part of a recent study that utilized CO2 measurements taken by the passive miniaturized laser heterodyne radiometer (Mini-LHR) at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.  Working in tandem with an AERONET sun photometer that measures aerosol optical depth during daylight hours, the study concludes that the technology offers a low-cost, small, portable sensor to measure atmospheric gases such as ozone, water vapor, methane, ammonia, …