I recently received funding to join the US National Science Foundation Asian Summer Monsoon Chemical Climate Impacts Project, ACCLIP. The plan is to fly out of Japan in summer 2020, to measure air which is carried to very high altitudes and out over the Pacific Ocean by powerful updrafts during the monsoon season from all… More Plans to explore Outflow from the Asian Summer Monsoon
Our first paper on the science from the ATom mission came out in Nature today! You can read the full manuscript here, or a shorter press release about it here. In this post I’ll tell you a little about what we discovered and how it came about. On ATom we flew these amazing flight paths… More New Paper: Tiny Particles Lead to Brighter Clouds in the Tropics
The journey from Denver, Colorado to Punta Arenas, on the most southerly point of Chile, where I was to meet our research aircraft, the DC8, takes about 30 hours. My colleague, Aga, was flying the first half of ATom-4, our final jaunt around the world measuring the properties of the remote atmosphere, sampling over the… More Punta Arenas
We’re about to head of on the fourth and final deployment of the NASA ATom mission, around-the-world research flights to understand the remote atmosphere. There are four deployments as we want to see how things vary season-to-seaon. For me the biggest change this time around was that might lab and flight partner, Agnieszka (Aga) moved… More Last Time Around the World
My last stop on ATom-3 was Punta Arenas, Chile. The flight around the Southern Ocean from New Zealand is long, and produces the worst on the whole mission for jet-lag. We left New Zealand early in the morning, and arrived after about 11 hours flying in Chile, a few hours earlier the same morning (things… More Challenges In Chile
After Fiji, we headed on to Christchurch, New Zealand with the ATom mission. Since we want to get good global coverage on ATom, and see the most remote parts of the atmosphere, we headed as far south of New Zealand as fuel would allow, before returning north to land. We passed the remote, but inhabited… More New challenges in New Zealand
After Alaska, we flew to Hawaii and then Fiji on NASA ATom. The tropics are very dynamic, active areas in the atmosphere and this produces a lot of interesting phenomena that we study. These flight routes are also pretty remote, so it’s interesting to see where the air is super clean and where we still… More Trouble in the Tropics
We’re off on NASA ATom part three, scanning the atmosphere for gases and particulate matter in our flying lab, a DC-8 aircraft full of scientific instruments. We have two science flights under our belts now. My colleague, Agnieszka, flew to the equator and back from California last Thursday, and then on Sunday I flew from… More Arctic Air and Alaskan Views
We’re preparing for our third set of round-the-world flights measuring the global distribution of particulate matter on the NASA Atmospheric Tomography Mission. We spent last week at NASA Armstrong, where the plane we use, a DC-8, is based. We tested instruments, installed some last-minute upgrades and then flew a test flight to make sure everything… More Third Time Around
I went to grad school to study how aerosols affect climate. I enjoyed atmospheric physics a lot during my undergraduate degree and I wanted to do research that could help solve big problems being faced by humanity. Climate change is one of those problems, and we need to reduce the uncertainty in our predictions of… More What I learned in Grad School, Part 1: The Science