Emerging Issues in Air Quality

Time: Wednesday, April 2, 2014 - 4:00pm - 5:00pm
Type: Seminar Series
Presenter: Daniel Jacob
Room/Office: 211 Mason Laboratory
Location:
Mason Laboratory
9 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
United States

Air quality issues in the US are becoming more complex as agencies try to meet increasingly tight air quality standards, as diminishing pollution sources are replaced by increasing ones, as damages to ecosystems attract increasing interest, and as air quality and climate policy become intertwined. The scale of the problems is increasing, challenging the traditional approach of local emission control. Satellite observations offer a new resource to monitor air quality and related emissions in a rapidly changing world. I will discuss a number of current topics in US air quality research including background ozone, organic aerosols, ammonia emissions, nitrogen deposition, methane emissions, and mercury.

Daniel J. Jacob is the Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Harvard University. He received his B.S. (1981) in Chemical Engineering from the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie de Paris, and his Ph.D. (1985) in Environmental Engineering from Caltech. He went to Harvard as a postdoc in 1985 and joined the faculty in 1987. Jacob’s research covers a wide range of topics in atmospheric composition ranging from air quality to climate change. He has been a pioneer in the development of global 3-D models of atmospheric composition, has served as Mission Scientist on eight NASA aircraft missions, and is a member of several satellite Science Teams. He presently leads the NASA Air Quality Applied Sciences Team and the Science Steering Committee for the NASA GEO-CAPE satellite mission. He serves as Model Scientist for the GEOS-Chem global chemical transport model and is the vice-chair of the NASA Earth Science Subcommittee. Among his professional honors are the Haagen-Smit Prize (2010), the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (2003), the AGU Macelwane Medal (1994) and the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (1989). Jacob has published over 300 papers and trained over 70 Ph.D. students and postdocs over the course of his career.