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NASA senior fellow talks Monday at Lab on aerosols and climate

Part of Frontiers in Geoscience series

Knowledge of atmospheric aerosols, such as smoke, pollution, dust, salt and sea particles small enough to be suspended in the air is still lacking despite decades of research. Understanding the global aerosol system is critical to quantifying anthropogenic climate change, to determine climate sensitivity from observations and to understand the hydrological cycle.

At 3 p.m., Monday in the Physics Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3, NASA senior fellow Yoram Kaufman will talk discuss this area of research in a talk entitled "Satellite Observations of the Effect of Natural and Anthropogenic Aerosols on Clouds and Climate." The talk is open to the Laboratory work force. The talk is part of the Frontiers in Geoscience Colloquium series sponsored by the Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) Division.

While a single instrument was used to demonstrate 50 years ago that global carbon dioxide levels are rising, posing threat of global warming, an array of satellites and field measurements coupled with chemical transport models to understand the global aerosol system are needed, according to abstract of Kaufman's talk.

This complexity of the aerosol problem results from their short lifetime (one week) and variable chemical composition. A new generation of satellites is providing researchers exciting opportunities to measure the global distribution of aerosols, distinguishing natural from anthropogenic aerosol and measuring their interaction with clouds and climate.

Kaufman has been at NASA's Goddard Flight Center since 1979. He is currently a senior atmospheric scientist at the flight center's Project Scientist of the Earth Observing System's first platform (Terra - formerly EOS AM-1). His present work includes theoretical and experimental research in atmospheric radiative transfer and remote sensing. It includes remote sensing of aerosol, their interaction with clouds and radiation, and impact on climate, with emphasis on biomass burning in the tropics. He conducted the Smoke/Sulfate, Clouds And Radiation (SCAR) field experiments in Brazil and the United States to characterize aerosol properties and their effect on clouds and radiation.

Kaufman has bachelor's and master's degrees in physics from Technion-Israeli Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, and his doctoral degree from Tel-Aviv University.

For more information, contact Manvendra Dubey of Hydrology, Geochemistry and Geology (EES-6) at 5-3128 or write to dubey@lanl.gov by electronic mail.

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