jt                                                                                                                                                                                                                     expt
Joel Thornton
Assistant Professor
Department of Atmospheric Sciences
University of Washington, Seattle


    thornton@atmos.washington.edu

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Department of
Atmospheric Sciences


Teaching

How are human activities impacting the composition of the atmosphere on local, regional and global scales?

Answering this question is critical for predicting future changes in pollution and climate and depends centrally on our knowledge of the underlying chemistry. Implicitly, it also requires us to know what the natural chemical state of the atmosphere is in the absence of perturbations by human activities.

 lab pic

                          Faye sets up a flow-tube experiment to measure aerosol uptake of N2O5 in the lab.

Photo-induced free radical gas-phase oxidation, gas-surface and gas-droplet interactions, particle nucleation and growth, among a myriad of other processes, participate in controlling the fate of human-induced emissions and thus atmospheric composition. This chemistry, coupled with atmospheric transport phenomena, makes answering the initial question a challenging, yet interesting, research endeavor.

  Clearing off the Inlet Tower

Glenn clears rime from the inlet tower at Mount Bachelor Observatory.

Current research efforts in our group are aimed at developing a detailed understanding of such processes from the molecular to the regional and global scales via a combination of fundamental laboratory studies and in situ atmospheric observations.