colleenb
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I'm a doctoral candidate conducting research at the intersection of air quality and climate change. My dissertation centers on shifts in the tropospheric oxidation via ozone and the hydroxyl radical (OH). I am advised by Arlene M. Fiore, and Róisín Commane and A. Park Williams are my committee members.
Ozone dry deposition
Recent work by one of my advisor's past students, Olivia Clifton (now a post-doc at NCAR), highlighted strong interannual variability in ozone dry deposition at a mid-latitude forest. However, most global chemical transport models assume a constant annual profile for this process. Using sensitivity simulations that I generated with the AM3 chemistry-climate model, our work illustrates that accounting for variability in the depositional sink is necessary to accurately attribute ozone production chemistry in the summer over the Southeast USA (Baublitz et al., GRL 2020).
Developing proxies for variability in the hydroxyl radical over the remote atmosphere
OH is the primary sink for methane, the second-largest contributor to human-caused climate change, as well as a precursor to tropospheric ozone. OH is extremely reactive, with a lifetime of less than one second, precluding the development of a robust measurement network, but constraining OH variability is necessary to confidently infer methane emissions from satellite data or to project the methane lifetime in simulations of the future climate. I'm using measurements from the NASA Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) aircraft campaign to attribute the drivers of OH shifts in the remote atmosphere. I am also assessing the skill of two potential proxies for OH toward improved constraints on global models that project atmospheric composition and climate.
Selected Publications: