Seminar

Abstract

Wildfire is a major air quality challenge in North America, now and for the coming decades. The NOAA Chemical Sciences Division is in the middle of a 5-year project to study the impact of wildfires on the atmosphere; FIREX-AQ: Fire Influence on Regional and Global Environments Experiment and Air Quality. Extensive measurements of gas and particle emissions and short-term chemical processing were conducted in the Fall 2016 at the USDA Fire lab in Missoula, Montana, as the first major effort of the project. This talk will describe the emissions of N-containing compounds observed in the FireLab study and will present the key budget and systematic relationships needed for the next generation of chemical models of wildfire smoke.

The second part of this talk will present some laboratory studies of cyanogen halides (XCN, where X = Cl, Br, or I), a class of compounds of emerging interest. After a brief introduction to their chemistry, some measurements of solubility and condensed phase reactions will be presented. These results will be discussed in relation to possible atmospheric loss processes and their impact on halogen and reduced-N chemistry in the troposphere.

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Jim Roberts is a scientist at NOAA in the Tropospheric Chemistry group. He received his PhD from CU Boulder, and joined the NOAA Chemical Sciences Division in 1992. Jim has coauthored more than 140 papers on a broad variety of research questions, including the chemistry of organic nitrates, halides, isocyanic acid, and biomass burning. In 2016, Jim receipt the Department of Commerce Gold Medal for Leadership for his work on wintertime ozone in the Utah.