Indiana University Bloomington

Atmospheric Science

Transcript

When I was in my middle teens my mother was diagnosed as being asthmatic.  And, at that point, it was related to air quality in the city we were living in, in Britain.  That really motivated me to want to understand how degraded air quality influenced  human health, but also other aspects of the environment, including the climate.  Ten years ago, we couldn't measure these three animated particles,  so the instrumentation has evolved to the point  where we can really now capture these particles just as they nucleate.  So it's really a time that's turned exciting with new instrumentation becoming  available that we can use to really address these fundamental questions.  Nucleation is a process by which a cluster of gas molecules transforms to become particles.  During the field experiment as a whole, as I said, we had measurements here  in Bloomington, on campus, measurements up in Indianapolis,  and measurements at the central tower facility.  We are measuring the size distribution, so the sizes of the different particles  that were forming, with our continuous measurements.  We also, on the tower, deployed instrumentation that allowed us to  capture those particles and then chemically analyze them,  both here at Indiana for the inorganic species,  so ammonium, sulfate, nitrate,  but also at Washington State University, where they'll analyze the particles  in terms of their organic contents and what are they made of.  On the tower, we also had some ammonia instruments  because the ammonia may be a key gas in this process.  So, we had instrumentation on the tower so that we could be looking  really at the heights where we believe nucleation was occurring,  and we also had measurements on the ground,  where simply the instruments are too massive to put them on the tower,  so that included our sulfuric acid analyzer and also an analyzer from  another great peer at IU that measures what we call OH.  Very early on, I knew I wanted to be an academic because  I think one of the key roles we can play is educate the next generation of geoscientists  and I think that's a really key consideration for me in terms of what I do.  [ End Credits ]