index

Hello, and welcome to my homepage.

I am a research scientist in the Science Directorate at the NASA Langley Research Center. My work involves three-dimensional modeling and data analysis studies of the Earth's atmosphere, with particular focus on understanding the impact of dynamics and long-range transport on atmospheric composition and air quality.

As part of my research, I'm attached to Daniel Jacob's group at Harvard University. where I'm working towards a PhD in atmospheric sciences. Recently, I have been working on the global disperal of mineral dust in the Earth's atmosphere using the GEOS-Chem model. One study is focused on the impact of transpacific transport of mineral dust on aerosol concentration in the United States, see Fairlie et al. [2006]. Recently, I've been looking at the impact of uptake of nitric acid and sulfur dioxide on dust on NOy partitioning.

I've been working with colleagues at EPA on an Advanced Monitoring Initiative (AMI) project to investigate the impact of regional airborne transport of sulfate aerosol at east coast monitoring sites, specifically Baltimore, MD. This "source apportionment study" has involved sampling chemical and meteorological fields from the Community Multiscale Air Quality model (CMAQ), using a back trajectory technique. and comparing results with ground-based, and satellite observations.

Another project I've been working on is to diagnose dynamical processes responsible for the development of fine-scale structure observed in the upper troposphere in the vicinity of the subtropical jetstream. Slender layers or filamentary structures, and other small-scale structures, provide clues to the processes that created them, processes associated with exchange of air across the tropopause, and possible irreversible mixing of air with different origins and chemical characteristics. I've been working with my NASA colleague, Melody Avery, using insitu observations from the NASA DC8 aircraft, results from the Realtime Air Quality Modeling System (RAQMS), and trajectory calculations, [Fairlie et al., 2007] .

I have been very fortunate in my career to be involved in a number of airborne measurement field campaigns. These have been focussed on unserstanding polar ozone depletion: the 1994 Airborne Southern Hemisphere Ozone Experiment (ASHOE); the 1997 Polar Ozone Loss over the Arctic Region in Summer (POLARIS) mission; the 1999/2000 SAGE III Ozone Loss and Validation Experiment (SOLVE); and continental outflow and intercontinental transport of pollution: the 2001 Transport and Chemical evolution over the Pacific (TRACE-P) campaign, and the more recent INTEX-A and INTEX-B campaigns.