Tag: Atmospheric

Tech Team Tackles Tar Balls’ Impacts On Climate

Research by Claudio Mazzoleni and physics alumni Susan Mathai ’23 and Swarup China ’12 featured in a news article in Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) by the EMSL. Mazzoleni and a multi-institutional team of researchers set out to determine exactly how solar radiation from the sun interacts with individual tar balls dispersed over a mountainous region in northern Italy.  The research assesses the optical properties of individual tar balls to better understand their influence on climate. 

Tar balls, found in biomass-burning smoke (think smoke from forest fires), impact the Earth’s radiative balance. Understanding the optical properties of tar balls can help reduce uncertainties associated with the contribution of biomass-burning aerosol in current climate models.

The original paper was selected for the cover of the Nov 7th issue of Environmental Science and Technology, and was co-authored by Tyler Capek and Susan Mathai (both Physics); Daniel Veghte of The Ohio State University; Zezhen Cheng, Swarup China ’12 (PhD Atmospheric Sciences), Libor Kovarik, Mazzoleni, and Kuo-Pin Tseng, of the PNNL; and Silvia Bucci and Angela Marinoni, Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (ISAC)-National Research Council of Italy.

Image of Claudio Mazzoleni
Claudio Mazzoleni
Professor, Physics
Image of Susan Mathai
Susan Mathai ’23
Image of Swarup China
Swarup China ’12

Two Students Receive DoD SMART Scholarships

Dan Yeager
PhD Candidate Dan Yeager

Ph.D. candidates Dan Yeager and Lucas Simonson have each been awarded a Department of Defense Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (DoD SMART) Scholarship.

The DoD SMART Scholarship provides students with full tuition for up to five years, mentorship, summer internships, a stipend, and full-time employment with the DoD after graduation. Dan and Lucas join a list of 26 prior Michigan Tech Huskies to have received this prestigious scholarship.

Dan is working with Professor Raymond Shaw, with a focus on cloud micro-physics and computational fluid dynamics. He is also serving as a physics representative to the Graduate Student Government.

Yeager will be affiliated with the Naval Oceanographic Office in Mississippi.

Lucas Simonson
PhD Candidate Lucas Simonson

Lucas is working with Professor Ramy El-Ganainy, where he studies Integrated Optics and Photonics; learning how light and matter interact on a quantum scale.

Simonson will be affiliated with the US Army’s C5ISR Center in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia.

Guest Blog: Uncovering Global Dust-Climate Connections

By Kimberly Geiger, College of Engineering

A satellite photo of a dust storm
“Godzilla” Saharan dust storm in June 2020. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Developed at Michigan Tech, a new global weather station-based dataset named dulSD is enabling long-term, large-scale monitoring of the dust cycle.

As wind shapes the surface of the Earth, it pulls dust from dry, exposed land surfaces into the atmosphere. Xin Xi (GMES) uses observations and models to study the sources, transformation and transport of dust to assess its impact on climate and air quality.

“Airborne dust aerosols impact the Earth in a myriad of ways,” he explained. “Mineral dust interacts with the global energy budget, ocean biogeochemistry, air quality and agriculture.”

Satellite remote sensing, a major source of information to study global dust variability, lacked the specifics Xi needed. He revisited the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Integrated Surface Database and set out to create a new dataset for evaluating global dust, which he named duISD.

How much dust is there? Read more on Unscripted, the University’s research blog.

New Funding

Raymond Shaw (Physics/EPSSI) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $2,903,682 research and development grant from the National Science Foundation.

Shaw, co-investigators Will Cantrell, Kartik Iyer, Claudio Mazzoleni, and researchers from institutions across the country will collaborate on the project titled “A Community Laboratory Facility for Exploring and Sensing of Aerosol-Cloud-Drizzle Processes: The Aerosol-Cloud-Drizzle Convection Chamber.”

The proposed ACDC2 cloud chamber will be a world class facility, capable of producing droplets up to the size of drizzle while allowing air motion analogous to that in real clouds.

In Print

Complex, noncore-shell morphology of BC-containing particle, from Figure 1, image A in recent study.

A recent study, Radiative absorption enhancements by black carbon controlled by particle-to-particle heterogeneity in composition, stemming from a collaboration between Brookhaven National Laboratory, Michigan Tech, and other institutions was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and has been highlighted in the research highlights section of Nature Climate Change this March. 

The research resulted in the development of a new modeling approach – guided by experimental results – to account more accurately for the effects of soot on climate. Coauthors of the paper include two former students of the Atmospheric Sciences Ph.D. program from the physics department, Drs. Janarjan Bhandari and Swarup China.

Janarjan Bhadari, ’18, currently works at the Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota, and Swarup China, ’14, is at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

New Funding

Pengfei XuePengfei Xue (CEE/GLRC) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $109,790 research and development cooperative agreement with the University of Michigan.

The project is entitled, “The Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR): Long-Term Data Assimilative, Temperature and Currents Database for the Great Lakes (Year 2: Lake Michigan).

This is a one year project.

Tech Chemist Reviews UN Report on the Environment

The sixth GlobaSarah Greenl Environmental Outlook has been released while environmental ministers from around the world are in Nairobi to participate in the world’s highest-level environmental forum.

The report warns that human health is in dire straits without urgent actions to protect the environment. Sarah Green (Chem) is a scientific reviewer.

The most comprehensive and rigorous assessment on the state of the environment completed by the UN in the last five years was published yesterday (March 13), warning that damage to the planet is so dire that people’s health will be increasingly threatened unless urgent action is taken.

Read the full story on mtu.edu/news.