What's cool

• CAC Emeritus Professor David Griffith and CAC Honorary Professorial Fellow Ian Galbally published an article on Climate Change: Atmospheric Facts and Figures in the June-August 2021 issue of Chemistry in Australia.
• PhD student Susan John’s paper entitled “2019-20 Australian bushfires and anomalies in carbon monoxide surface and column measurements” is published in Atmosphere.
• After submitting his MPhil thesis in May, Neil Page has taken a job at AirLabs Environmental, Brisbane. Congratulations Neil!
• CAC member Jack Simmons' paper entitled “Summer aerosol measurements over the East Antarctic seasonal ice zone” is published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, co-authored with Stephen Wilson, Scott Chambers, Alastair Williams, and Alan Griffiths.

• Nicholas Jones, David Griffith and Clare Murphy (aka Clare Paton-Walsh) co-authored Franco et al., (2021) “Ubiquitous atmospheric production of organic acids mediated by cloud droplets” in Nature.
• Franco et al., (2021) “Ubiquitous atmospheric production of organic acids mediated by cloud droplets” scores a News and Views Article in Nature.
•  David Marston from Bruker visits to start the commissioning of the new HR125 remote sensing Fourier transform spectrometer.

• CAC celebrates the awarding of an Emeritus Professorship to David Griffith founding member of the group.
• Alastair Williams and Scott Chambers travelled to Cape Grim for the long overdue and much anticipated refurbishment of the primary radon detector (HURD3).

• Jenny Fisher presented a research plenary on “Sustainable Planet” for the University Global Partnership Network (UGPN) 2021 virtual conference.
• Nicholas Jones and Clare Murphy (aka Clare Paton-Walsh) co-authored Steinbrecht et al., (2021) “COVID-19 Crisis Reduces Free Tropospheric Ozone Across the Northern Hemisphere” in Geophysical Research Letters.
• Scott Chambers and Alastair Williams co-authored Pan et al. (2021) “Characterization of a novel large area microdosimeter system for low dose rate radiation environments”, Nuclear Inst. and Methods in Physics Research, A 1002 (2021) 165238

• CAC researcher Jenny Fisher and co-author Peter Nelson from Macquarie University published an article in The Conversation titled Australia’s gold industry stamped out mercury pollution – now it's coal's turn. The piece is based on their new review paper, Atmospheric mercury in Australia: Recent findings and future research needs, published in a special forum in the journal Elementa, Science of the Anthropocene. The work provides a contribution to the Mercury Australia research network, for which Jenny is a Convener and Lead Researcher.
• Stephen Macfarlane and James Portwin joined us as new Honours students. Stephen is working on mercury emissions in Australia and James is working on radonic storms in the Southern Ocean (jointly with ANSTO).
• Scott Chambers and Alastair Williams co-authored Zhang et al. (2021) “Simulation of radon-222 with the GEOS-Chem global model: emissions, seasonality, and convective transport”, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21, 1861–1887, 2021.

• PhD student Jhonathan Ramirez Gamboa's paper "Seasonal Variation of Biogenic and Anthropogenic VOCs in a Semi-Urban Area Near Sydney, Australia" published in Atmosphere
• CAC took delivery of our new Bruker IFS125HR to the Molecular Horizons building
• Dominique Bally Kpokro became our newest PhD student! Dom is doing a joint PhD between UOW and the University of Surrey in the UK and is spending 2021 in Surrey. We look forward to welcoming him to Wollongong in 2022.
• Scott Chambers co-authored Fortuniak et al. (2021) “Temperatemire fluctuations from carbon sink to carbon source following changes in water table”, Science of the Total Environment 756 (2021) 144071.

• PhD student Beata Bukosa officially completed her PhD. Beata is now a postdoc at NIWA in Wellington, New Zealand.
• Frances Phillips (pictured) and Clare Murphy gave talks at the CASANZ NSW branch annual meeting in Sydney

• Most staff and student members of CAC gave presentations at the Atmospheric Composition & Chemistry Observations & Modelling Conference (incorporating the Cape Grim Annual Science Meeting 2019) at CSIRO  Oceans and Atmosphere, Climate Science Centre in Aspendale.

• CAC Director Clare Murphy attended the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Scientific Steering Committee in Mexico City to discuss priorities for supporting atmospheric chemistry towards a sustainable future.

  

• Dave Griffith travelled to Brisbane to install instruments in AIRBOX aboard the RV Investigator which sets sail for a long summer voyage around to Freemantle via Darwin. AIRBOX will be measuring atmospheric composition across the tropics in the coming months. After docking in Freemantle, AIRBOX will be transported to Cataract for the COALA-JOEYS biogenics campaign.
• CAC students Susan, Jhonathan and Neil gave great talks at the inaugural SEALS postgraduate conference at Kioloa.
• Nicholas Deutscher elected as Deputy Director for the CAC cluster at group meeting.
• Travis Naylor and Hamish McDougall spent 3 days (October 2-4) at the Dutson Downs site, where we are operating a Spectronus as well as an open-path NIR instrument as part of the GipNet project. Travis and Hamish spent time doing general instrument maintenance, especially checking the performance of the OP-NIR after an incident involving some bulls. Hamish also took the opportunity to take several sets of VOC tube measurements near both the Spectronus and OP-NIR, to assess the VOCs potentially emitted from the organic recycling facility and a wastewater wetland.
• CAC Honorary Professor Ian Galbally is the joint lead author on a new paper "Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report: Tropospheric ozone from 1877 to 2016, observed levels, trends and uncertainties"

• Clare Murphy and Frances Phillips gave talks at the CASANZ conference in Queenstown, NZ where they presented work from the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub on air quality in Sydney.

• CAC major equipment grand bid, led by Nicholas Deutscher and titled “A new spectrometer to future proof the Atmospheric Remote Sensing Program at UOW”  was awarded $250,000 in funding towards the cost of replacing the high resolution solar remote sensing spectrometer. If fully funded, the new spectrometer will be located on the atmospheric platform of the new Molecular Horizon’s building and will be run in parallel with the existing spectrometer for ~ 1 year to ensure compatibility of the time-series of atmospheric composition from Wollongong.

• CAC staff including Graham Kettlewell got a peak preview of the new atmospheric research platform and laboratory on the top floor of the new Molecular Horizon’s building.

• Volitaire Velazco travelled to Burgos to work on the TCCON site as part of the NASA CAMP2Ex campaign.

• Nicholas Deutscher, Graham Kettlewell and Nicholas Jones visited the Darwin TCCON site. During this time they successfully re-installed the solar tracker and finally re-commenced taking TCCON measurements. As an extension to the Fiducial Reference Measurements for Greenhouse Gases (FRM4GHG) project, they also took the UOW-developed Solar IRCube and an EM27/SUN and installed these on the roof of the container to allow for several months of comparative measurements, assessing the low spectral resolution instruments compared to the TCCON gold standard.

•  Clare Murphy was interviewed by The Wire about  The huge fires in the Amazon rainforest  
• 2019 has seen 3 PhD students reach the end of their studies: Doreena Dominick, Bea Bukosa and Jesse Greenslade. We are looking forward to Doreena’s graduation in November, meanwhile Bea and Jesse are awaiting examiners comments on their theses.  

• Members of the Centre for Atmospheric Chemistry and friends assembled for a seminar celebrating the first 5 decades of Dave Griffith’s scientific career. The event was held at Kiama on the eve of Dave’s 70th birthday.

• CAC Director Clare Murphy was interviewed as part of Chemistry World’s feature article on Wildfires and Atmospheric Chemistry.
• Vicarious radiometric calibration of passive optical instruments from satellites is carried out on the large homogeneous desert environment in Nevada, USA. A new paper published in ESSD (Velazco et al., 2019) presented the opportunities that Alice Springs, Australia could offer in the context of satellite surface products and associated emissivity assessments. In addition to near-undisturbed atmospheric conditions, the desert environment provides high surface reflectivity, which is needed for satellite validation purposes. By investigating measurements over the Australian desert from Japan’s Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) and using a portable FTIR spectrometer with a UOW-built fairing and clamshell cover to endure the harsh desert conditions, the UOW team made the first steps in making desert Australia a potential future site for validation of space-based sensors.

• Breaking the Tie: Burgos TCCON. NASA highlights the quality and importance of the Burgos TCCON data (Velazco et al., 2017) in improving the recent version 9 ACOS retrieval algorithm for OCO-2 at the 15^th International Workshop on Greenhouse Gas Measurements from Space (IWGGMS-15), held in Sapporo, Japan. Dr. O’Dell from the NASA ACOS team stated that “Space-based measurements of the column-mean dry air mole fraction of carbon dioxide (XCO₂), if made with sufficient accuracy and precision, offer a potential goldmine of information on CO₂ surface fluxes at both small and large spatial scales. However, possible biases in satellite XCO₂ will create spurious fluxes and are a limiting factor in utilizing these data” (O’Dell et al., 2019, IWGGMS 15 Abstract Collection). In their presentation, Burgos TCCON was shown to be excellently situated to “break the tie” in bias estimates to within 0.5 ppm-1.0 ppm
• UOW was ranked in the top 75 universities for Atmospheric Sciences in the world in the Shanghai Ranking's 2019 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects.
• What is the effect of ozone depletion, and the response  - the Montreal protocol - that was agreed upon internationally? Two UOW scientists, Stephen Wilson from CAC and Sharon Robinson, are authors of a new review of the answer to this question in Nature Sustainability. The work highlights the impact of the ozone hole on the southern hemisphere climate, an interaction that was not recognized back when the original agreements were signed. While significant changes have been identified, these have been limited by global action: the world avoided would have been much less hospitable for life.
• CAC researcher Clare Murphy spent time on study leave in the UK visiting collaborators at the London School of Economics, Cranfield University and the UK’s National Physical Laboratory before heading home to Wollongong via the iCACGP meeting in Montreal. She is pictured here with Professor Neil Harris at Cranfield University during a visit to the FAAM airborne laboratory.

• After two years of successful operation and the validation within EMeRGe-Asia, the Burgos TCCON station has been recognized as a “full” TCCON station by the TCCON steering committee at the annual meeting held in Wanaka, New Zealand. Within the EMeRGe campaign in Asia, profiles of CO₂ and CH₄ measured on board of the "High Altitude and Long Range Research Aircraft" (HALO) were provided to the Burgos TCCON station in order to fulfil this requirement. This is a significant contribution to TCCON and to the validation of space-based greenhouse gases remote sensing satellites like GOSAT, GOSAT-2, OCO-2, TROPOMI, etc., as well as to science in Southeast Asia.

• A new paper on CO2, CH4 and CO distribution, sources and sinks and their co-variation in the Australian region led by CAC PhD student Beata Bukosa was published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. The authors used shipborne measurements of the carbon greenhouse-gases together with the GEOS-Chem model to quantify and constrain the processes driving the changes of these gases. Their results point to overestimates of CH4 from coal burning and underestimate of all three gases from biomass burning. They also identified missing sources from fossil fuel, biofuel, oil, gas, coal, livestock, biomass burning and the biosphere in the model, pointing to the need to further develop and evaluate greenhouse-gas emission inventories for the Australian continent. Other CAC co-authors include Nicholas Deutscher, Jenny Fisher, Clare Murphy and David Griffith.
• CAC researcher Jenny Fisher was awarded third place as a finalist in the Australian round for the ASPIRE Prize. The APEC Science Prize for Innovation, Research and Education (“ASPIRE”) is an annual award which recognizes young scientists who have demonstrated a commitment to both excellence in scientific research, as evidenced by scholarly publication and cooperation with scientists from other APEC member economies.
• The annual joint Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) and Network for Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change- InfraRed Working Group (NDACC-IRWG) Meeting was held from May 19-23 in Wanaka, New Zealand, hosted by the New Zealand National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). Around 50 experts from these networks gathered to discuss scientific progress and future directions, and to represent their TCCON and NDACC measurement sites. TCCON co-chair and deputy chair, David Griffith and Nicholas Deutscher, attended the meeting, along with site PIs Voltaire Velazco and Nicholas Jones. They were joined by former CAC Phd student Beata Bukosa, in her first week in a new role working as a postdoctoral fellow for NIWA. All CAC representatives presented and contributed to running sessions within the meeting. During the meeting, the Burgos TCCON site, co-operated by CAC, NIES, and EDC, was elevated to full TCCON status by unanimous approval of the TCCON steering committee.
• CAC PhD student Beata Bukosa and researcher Jenny Fisher attended the 9th International GEOS-Chem Meeting (IGC9) at Harvard University. Beata presented her work developing a new model capability to simultaneously simulate multiple carbon greenhouse gases, and both attended the myriad talks, posters, clinics, and model development working groups. Jenny also attended the GEOS-Chem Steering Committee meeting held after the conference.
• OCO-3, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 satellite, launched successfully from Cape Canaveral on Saturday 4th May on its way to the International Space Station. CAC researchers are closely involved in the validation of OCO carbon dioxide measurements.

• CAC researcher David Griffith presented an invited lecture on the impact of isotopic variations on measurements of atmospheric greenhouse gases at the European Geophysical Union 2019 General Assembly. He also presented papers on open-path FTIR greenhouse gas measurements as part of the Gipnet project for detecting fugitive GHG plumes, and solar remote sensing at the Burgos, Philippines site (all with other UOW coauthors).
• CAC researcher David Griffith visited the Korean Research Institute for Standards and Science (KRISS, S. Korea) and Laboratory for Science of Climate and Environment (France) to advise and collaborate on applications and use of the UoW-Ecotech Spectronus Greenhouse Gas analyser and on solar remote sensing measurements. The Spectronus is being introduced into the pan-European ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observing System) greenhouse gas measurement and research programs.

• Whilst at Macquarie Island, CAC members Clare Murphy and Alan Griffiths undertook some checks and tests on the instruments in the Clean Air Lab, including lowering and checking on the inlet mast and leak checking the radon detector.

• CAC members Clare Murphy and Alan Griffiths were the Voyage 4 researchers aboard the Australian Antarctic Divisions Aurora Australis resupply voyage to Macquarie Island as part of the CAMMPCAN project. In addition to running the AIRBOX suite of instruments in the Southern Ocean, the team captured an interesting dataset at port in Hobart as the city was impacted by the recent Tasmanian fires. This may be the most comprehensive set of aerosol phase measurements ever made within a smoke plume in Australia.

• CAC researcher Voltaire Velazco presented his work and talked about adventures in the field at the Uni in the Brewery event, along with two colleagues from the School of Earth, Atmospheric, and Life Sciences (Marian Wong and Dominique Tanner). Watch the event online!
• CAC welcomed two new PhD students. Jhonathan Ramirez Gamboa will focus on the COALA-JOEYS campaign and improving our understanding of biogenic emissions in southeast Australia, and Shyno Susan Johnwill focus on variability of carbon monoxide in Australia from satellite and ground-based measurements.
• The new Mercury Australia network was launched at ANU on 28 March 2019. The network brings together 20 researchers from eight universities across Australia, including CAC researcher Jenny Fisher, who are investigating the historical and contemporary uses and impacts of mercury. The network will engage with government, industry, and the public to provide high quality, independent data and information that can be translated to practical policy advice.
• The 4-yearly scientific assessment of the impact of Ozone Depleting Substances has just been published both by the UN and in the scientific literature (Photochemical and Photobiological Sciences). The review of the impact on Air Quality was led by CAC member Stephen Wilson. The University of Wollongong played a large role in this report overall, as in addition to this lead authorship Sharon Robinson (biology) was co-author of two other assessments. No other university is represented so heavily.
• CAC researcher Voltaire Velazco attended the CAMP2Ex (Cloud, Aerosol and Monsoon Processes Philippines Experiment) science team meeting in Pasadena, California ahead of the CAMP2Ex aircraft experiment taking place in Southeast Asia in August. Voltaire's role involves getting flights over the TCCON site at Burgos, and complementing the campaign's science objectives with ground-based FTIR and LIDAR measurements.
• The Aurora Australis is due to set sail for the sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island on 5 March, with CAC director Clare Murphy and CAC associate member Alan Griffiths on board. Very high seas are predicted for the transit. The atmospheric chemists will be busy onboard measuring a diverse array of trace gases and particulate parameters using the AIRBOX mobile laboratory, with the goal of better understanding the process of aerosol formation over the southern ocean. 

• PhD student Neil Page attended the one-month European Research Course on Atmospheres (ERCA) held in Grenoble, France with participants and lecturers from all over the world. ERCA covers the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, the climate system and atmospheric pollution. The program also includes group projects; practicals using lidars, spectrometers and models; and a research visit to the Observatoire de Haute-Provence for astronomical observations. Neil followed ERCA with a research visit to collaborator Aurélien Dommergue at the Institut des Géosciences de l'Environnement. 
• Over the summer, CAC hosted three undergraduate researchers. Chris Nelson has been undertaking a SMAH Summer Scholar project with Nicholas Deutscher working on atmospheric AirCore profiling. Chris is a recent chemistry graduate from the University of Queensland. He has been joined in laboratory and field testing and sampling by Alex Carter, a 2nd/3rd year undergraduate chemistry intern. Chris and Alex have been developing the horizontal AirCore sampling technique to improve precision and reduce the effects of contamination. They have also been sampling in situ in the Wollongong area, exploring methane hotspots, as well as testing components for upcoming balloon-borne AirCore launches. Brittany Walker, who recently completed her 1st year in Atmospheric Science, has been working as an intern with Jenny Fisher, updating and modernising the software package used to benchmark the GEOS-Chem mercury model.

• Members of CAC checked out the location of the new atmospheric platform on top of the Molecular Horizon’s building – agreeing the last details before the concrete floor was poured!

CAC member Jenny Fisher co-presented a session on "Mercury in the Southern Hemisphere" as part of the United Nations Environment Programme's Minamata Online seminar series. Minamata Online is designed "to provide an opportunity for government officials, scientists, NGOs, and other stakeholders to better understand the Minamata Convention [on Mercury]'s provisions, as well as policy and scientific aspects." Jenny's session reviewed the current state of knowledge on mercury research in the Southern Hemisphere, and over 200 participants registered to the event. Slides and a recording of the presentation are available at Minamata Online.