Atmospheric chemistry is a branch of atmospheric science in which the chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere and that of other planets is studied. It is a multidisciplinary approach of research and draws on environmental chemistry, physics, meteorology, computer modeling, oceanography, geology and volcanology and other disciplines. Research is increasingly connected with other areas of study such as climatology.
Melissa G. Trainer is an American astrobiologist who in 2004 demonstrated empirically that life could have formed on Earth through the interaction of methane, carbon dioxide and ultraviolet light (sunlight). She is Assistant Chief for Science, Operations, and Strategic Planning in the Planetary Environments Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
AutoChem is NASA release software that constitutes an automatic computer code generator and documenter for chemically reactive systems written by David Lary between 1993 and the present. It was designed primarily for modeling atmospheric chemistry, and in particular, for chemical data assimilation.
Over the last two centuries many environmental chemical observations have been made from a variety of ground-based, airborne, and orbital platforms and deposited in databases. Many of these databases are publicly available. All of the instruments mentioned in this article give online public access to their data. These observations are critical in developing our understanding of the Earth's atmosphere and issues such as climate change, ozone depletion and air quality. Some of the external links provide repositories of many of these datasets in one place. For example, the Cambridge Atmospheric Chemical Database, is a large database in a uniform ASCII format. Each observation is augmented with the meteorological conditions such as the temperature, potential temperature, geopotential height, and equivalent PV latitude.
Roger Willis Daley was a British meteorologist known particularly for his work on data assimilation.
A chemical transport model (CTM) is a type of computer numerical model which typically simulates atmospheric chemistry and may give air pollution forecasting.
Vincenzo Balzani is an Italian chemist, now emeritus professor at the University of Bologna.
Richard B. (Ricky) Rood is a professor of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Prior to 2005, he held several leadership positions at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He has more than 100 academic publications.
Ulrich "Uli" Pöschl is an Austrian chemist who was appointed Director of the newly founded Department of Multiphase Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany on 1 October 2012.
Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts is a Canadian-American atmospheric chemist. She is a professor in the chemistry department at the University of California, Irvine and is the Director of AirUCI Institute. Finlayson-Pitts and James N. Pitts, Jr. are the authors of Chemistry of the Upper and Lower Atmosphere: Theory, Experiments, and Applications (1999). She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2006 and is the laureate for the 2017 Garvan–Olin Medal. In 2016 she co-chaired the National Academy of Science report "The Future of Atmospheric Chemistry Research"
James "Jim" P. Ferris was an American chemist. He is known for his contributions to the understanding of the origins of life on Earth, specifically by demonstrating a successful mechanism of clay-catalyzed polymerization of RNA, providing further evidence for the RNA World Hypothesis. Additionally, his work in atmospheric photochemistry has illuminated many of the chemical processes which occur in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn's moon, Titan.
Sreedharan Krishnakumari Satheesh is an Indian meteorologist and a professor at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He holds the chair of the Divecha Centre for Climate Change, a centre under the umbrella of the IISc for researches on climate variability, climate change and their impact on the environment. He is known for his studies on atmospheric aerosols and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. Indian Academy of Sciences Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India as well as The World Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences in 2009. He received the TWAS Prize of The World Academy of Sciences in 2011. In 2018, he received the Infosys Prize, one of the highest monetary awards in India that recognize excellence in science and research, for his work in the field of climate change.
Anne Mee Thompson is an American scientist, who specializes in atmospheric chemistry and climate change. Her work focuses on how human activities have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, climate forcing, and the Earth's oxidizing capacity. Thompson is an elected fellow of the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and AAAS.
Shian-Jiann Lin is a Taiwanese-American atmospheric scientist. He is currently the head of the Weather and Climate Dynamics Division at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the lead developer of the GFDL Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere Dynamical Core (FV3). and a lead developer or key contributor to several weather and climate models developed using FV3.
Sonia Maria Kreidenweis is an American Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University. Her research considers aerosols and their impact on weather and the climate. She has previously served as President of the American Association for Aerosol Research and was a board member of the American Meteorological Society. She was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2019.
Mian Chin is a Chinese atmospheric chemist. She is a physical scientist in the atmospheric chemistry and dynamics laboratory in the earth science division at Goddard Space Flight Center. Her research includes aerosol-cloud-chemistry-climate interactions. She received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal in 2005.
Vernon R. Morris is an American atmospheric scientist, Foundation Professor and Associate Dean of the Knowledge Enterprise in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. He is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the former Director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at Howard University. He was awarded the 2018 American Meteorological Society Charles E. Anderson award and the 2020 Presidential Citation for Science and Society American Geophysical Union.
William Ka Ming Lau is a senior scientist at the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, a research center at the University of Maryland and an Adjunct Professor of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Maryland. A physicist by training, his research spans over 4 decades covering a wide range of topics in climate dynamics, tropical meteorology, ocean-atmosphere coupling, aerosol-water cycle interactions, and climate variability and change. Lau conducted pioneering research on atmospheric teleconnection, and the global monsoon climate system. He discovered the aerosol-monsoon regional feedback mechanism, i.e., the Elevated Heat Pump (EHP) effect that strongly modulate climate change in Asian monsoon regions. He was the senior author of a popular research reference book, “Intraseasonal Variability in the Atmosphere-Ocean Climate System”. As of November 2020, he has coauthored 297 refereed papers, with total citation = 33,932, h-index=101.
Kerri Pratt is an American chemist and Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan. Her research considers atmospheric chemistry and how it impacts human health. She studies the interactions of atmospheric gases using mass spectrometry based techniques.
Georgiy L. Stenchikov is an applied mathematician and climate scientist focusing on studies of physical processes that govern the Earth's climate. He is a professor in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
