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SUMMARY:EESS talk on "Chasing pre-industrial aerosol around the globe"
DTSTART:20240227T121500
DTEND:20240227T131500
DTSTAMP:20260919T215345Z
UID:acb34553ca90a395138427575589192d434c8e5a9e28c41a894c9ed4
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Frederico Bianchi\, Institute for Atmospheric and Earth 
 System Research INAR\, University of Helsinki\, Finland\nAbstract:\nAtmosp
 heric aerosols affect the climate directly by absorbing or scattering inco
 ming radiation and indirectly by acting as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN)
  changing therefore the cloud albedo. A major fraction of these CCN comes 
 from gas to particle conversion (nucleation). During the last decade\, sev
 eral nucleation studies have been published based on field observations\, 
 however most of them in the planetary boundary layer. Therefore\, only lit
 tle information is available about the free troposphere.The aim of this pr
 esentation is to elucidate the latest founding about what species contribu
 te to new particle formation (NPF) in remote places\, especially at high a
 ltitude.In the last years\, we have used state-of-the-art instruments\, fi
 rst at the Swiss high alpine research\nstation Jungfraujoch (3580 m asl\, 
 Bianchi et al.\, 2016)\, at the Himalayan Nepal Climate Observatory Pyrami
 d (NCO-P) site on the southern slope of the Himalayas\, not far from Evere
 st base camp (5079 m asl)(Bianchi et al.\, 2021) and finally at the Chacal
 taya station in Bolivia (520 m asl)(Bianchi et al.\,\n2022). Previous stud
 ies have already showed that at all these locations NPF takes place freque
 ntly. However\, the chemical information of the condensable vapours drivin
 g NPF is still missing.Our latest measurements conducted at the Chacaltaya
  station reveal that oxidized organic molecules (OOMs)\, derived from biog
 enic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by the Amazon rainforest\, 
 may play an important role in NPF in the tropical free troposphere on a co
 ntinental scale (Zha et al.\, 2023). Another study performed in a Finnish 
 peatland found pure biogenic NPF initiated by highly oxygenated organic mo
 lecules (HOM) in a special environment with minimal sulfur or nitrogen oxi
 de pollution\, essentially a shallow and stable surface layer of air above
  peatland that likely\nresembles the pre-industrial atmosphere (Huang et a
 l.\, in review). In this seminar\, I will show a detailed analysis of the 
 particle evolution during nucleation and the chemical composition of the s
 mall clusters measured with advanced mass spectrometers. I will also show 
 that these processes are potentially very interesting to understand the ae
 rosol conditions in the pre-industrial era where information are really sc
 arse. Finally\, I will give some insights regarding the\nlatest results ob
 tained by the measurements done over the Amazon and in a Finnish Peatland 
 where we have found the presence of biogenic vapors forming new particles 
 as the possible nucleation mechanism in the pre-industrial time.\n\nShort 
 Biography:\nFederico Bianchi\, born in Bergamo\, Italy\, in 1984\, graduat
 ed in chemistry from the University of Milan and received his PhD in atmos
 pheric chemistry from Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zürich in 2014. Fr
 om 2015 to 2018 he was a postdoc\, first at ETH Zürich\, and from 2016 a
 t the University of Helsinki\, funded by the Swiss National Science Founda
 tion. In 2018\, he was appointed Assistant Professor\, and after being awa
 rded with an ERC starting grant in 2019\, Associate Professor. Since 202
 3 he is a full professor on atmosphere and cryosphere interactions at the 
 University of Helsinki. He has won several awards\, among which the Arne R
 ichter Award from the European Geophysical Union for Outstanding Early Car
 eer Scientists in 2017\, and the Schmauss Award in 2021. His research focu
 ses on the formation of atmospheric new particles from the pristine free t
 roposphere to polluted megacities.\n 
LOCATION:GR A1 402 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==GR%20A1%20402 https://epfl.
 zoom.us/j/69011077410
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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