Particle formation, growth, and loss determine how an atmospheric chemical change propagates through an aerosol population. My work uses chemical transport modeling and size-resolved microphysics to examine these processes together with observations.
Published foundation
My doctoral research examined the spatial and seasonal distribution of atmospheric ammonia, the strengths and limits of available measurement and modeling approaches, and ammonia’s role in new particle formation.
In a first-author 2023 study, we evaluated ammonia’s importance for springtime particle formation and aerosol number abundance over the United States. In these simulations, ammonia’s participation in nucleation accounted for 63 ± 15% of particles larger than 10 nm and 16 ± 10% of CCN at 0.4% supersaturation. These estimates describe the study’s modeled springtime US conditions. Including ammonia also improved the comparison of modeled particle number with observations at the Southern Great Plains site.
The different responses of particle number and CCN motivate a central process question: what determines whether newly formed particles survive and grow to cloud-relevant sizes?
Next questions
I plan to examine ammonia perturbations under controlled sulfur-emission and meteorological backgrounds, beginning with a bounded region and season. The aim is to separate changes in particle formation from changes in growth and loss, then identify conditions in which particle number, mass, and cloud-forming potential respond differently.
Direct microphysics simulations and observational comparisons will provide the reference for evaluating faster representations. This approach also connects to my collaborative work on stratospheric particles and aircraft exhaust plumes, where particle-size evolution is central to interpreting the effects of an intervention.
Selected papers
- Spatial and seasonal ammonia: model–observation comparison — Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 2019.
- Ammonia measurement and modeling review — Atmosphere, 2020.
- Ammonia and springtime US particle formation — Science of the Total Environment, 2023.
- Stratospheric aerosol injection and particle microphysics — Environmental Research Letters, 2026.