Mark A. Zondlo
Assistant Professor of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Princeton University
Ph.D., Chemistry, University of Colorado, 1999 B.A., Chemistry, Rice University, 1994
Date：2nd Jul. 2013 (Tuesday)
Time：10:00-11:00 am
Venue：Room 301, Laodixue Building
Abstract
Understanding key scientific issues in global climate change and air quality requires robust measurements of atmospheric trace gas constituents on spatial scales that span several orders of magnitude in both the horizontal and vertical. While large scale horizontal features are well-captured by satellite measurements, small scale processes such as cloud formation and emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases are not resolved by remote sensing measurements. The largest uncertainty in predicting future climate relates to aerosol and cloud formation, and high-resolution measurements from a suite of mobile platforms including vehicles, UAVs, and stratospheric aircraft provide new insights to these processes. I will first discuss microscale measurements of ice supersaturated regions – the birthplaces of cirrus clouds - based upon global field experiments onboard the NSF Gulfstream-V aircraft. Water vapor heterogeneities play dominant roles in cirrus formation, opposite of what is currently assumed in cloud and climate model parameterizations. Next, I will discuss preliminary mobile measurements of atmospheric ammonia–an important precursor in fine particulate matter – from high-resolution, ground-based measurements in California and China during the NASA DISCOVER-AQ and CAREBEIJING-NCPfield campaigns. Large emissions are observed from agricultural and vehicular traffic, and current inventories of ammonia may be significantly underrepresented. In addition, a suite of other trace gas species measured simultaneously by our mobile sensing laboratory allows for discrimination between the different sources of ammonia. All of these efforts show the importance of understanding local emissions and cloud-aerosol processes at small scales in the atmosphere.
