Thornton Group

Department of Atmospheric Sciences
University of Washington, Seattle
I still look like this
Group Members
Research Projects
Joel Thornton
                     Meeting schedule

thornton@atmos.washington.edu
                 


Photo cour esy of



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  the natural chemical state of the atmosphere in the absence of human perturbations.


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above: Glenn Wolfe maintains the sampling inlet on the summit of Mt. Bachelor


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 above question a challenging, yet interesting, research endeavor.




above: Jim Kercher (left) helps change the sampling inlet on the RV Knorr somewhere in the N. Atlantic

Current research efforts in the Thornton 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, in situ atmospheric observations and computer modeling.