Organization:
Research Title: Tropospheric Chemistry
Funding Level (millions of dollars):
| FY94 | 7.3 |
|---|---|
| FY95 | 7.5 |
| FY96 | 6.8 |
Committee on Environment and Natural Resources (CENR) Component:
(a) Subcommittee: Global Change Research Subcommittee (90%)
Air Quality Research Subcommittee (10%)
(b) Environmental Issue: Global Change (60%), Natural Variability (15%),
Climate
Change (15%), Air Quality (10%)
(c) Research Activity: System structure and function: (100%)
Organizational Component:
Ecology and Atmospheric Chemistry Branch
Science Division
Office of Mission to Planet Earth
NASA Headquarters
Washington, DC 20546
Point of Contact:
Robert McNeil
Phone: 202-358-0239
E-Mail: jmcneal@hq.nasa.gov
Research Goals:
(a) To understand the chemistry of the global troposphere and the natural and
anthropogenic processes that control it, specifically processes that can lead to
intermediate
and long term chemical composition changes and resulting climate change. (b) To
provide
a chemical composition baseline in relatively clean air regions of the world against
which
future changes can be measured and the processes that produce them can be
assessed.
(c).
To develop the methods and measurement protocols for future ground and
airborne
operations in support of EOS satellite observations.
Research Description:
This activity consists of three components: (a) airborne measurement campaigns in
areas of
the world where changes in population, land use, and natural inputs to the
atmosphere
are
predicted by current understanding to have the most dramatically observable
impacts
on
atmospheric chemical composition and, eventually, climate, because of the
magnitude
of
the changes and/or the sensitivity of the atmosphere in the campaign areas, (b)
process
modeling of campaign results to build understanding and develop predictive
capabilities
with campaign data, and (3) instrument development to enable more sensitive and
reliable
data to be obtained, particularly in clean air areas where change is most readily
observable.
Program Interfaces:
This activity is part of the Atmospheric Science research activity of NASA's Mission
to
Planet Earth. It is coordinated with other related agency activities through the
Global
Change and Air Quality Research Subcommittees of Committee on Environment
and Natural Resources (CENR), and it receives guidance from
several National Research Council committees, notably the Atmospheric Chemistry
Panel
of Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate.
Program Milestones:
By the end of the decade the program will have provided data, in many cases the
only
multi-component data on tropospheric chemical composition and the processes that
drive it
in areas of the world of great importance in assessing global chemical change and
predicting the climate change that will result from it. These areas include tropical
rain-forests, the Arctic tundra, sub-Arctic forests, the tropical South Atlantic,
which is
undergoing heavy impacts from biomass burning, and the Pacific Ocean, a clean-air
region
under direct and growing impact from exploding population and economic growth
in
Asia.
Process models will have provided products bearing on the links between the
observations
of changing atmospheric chemistry and their links to ecosystem processes and to
meteorology. These products in turn are key inputs to the global predictive and
assessment
models under development in other areas of the global change research program.
Policy Payoffs:
(a) The reliability of global scale assessment and predictive models is directly
tied to the
availability of key data on the global system. Global atmospheric chemistry,
particularly
in
the troposphere and lower-stratosphere is an essential element in any global change
or
climate change scenario. It is known to be changing because of human activities,
which
emit pollutants directly and also affect the natural system, which is also a major
source-sink
region for the chemical components of the atmosphere. In addition to providing
highly
relevant data and understanding in its own right, global atmospheric chemistry
studies
will
develop the instrumentation, sampling protocols, and platforms for the ground-
based
and
airborne activities needed to support and validate the global observations planned
with the
EOS. The policy payoff from this task is that it will provide a major portion of
an
extremely critical data base, establish a basis for understanding global observations,
and
contribute to the credibility and robustness of the technical underpinnings for future
policy
actions to deal with global change.