Collaborative Research: Understanding the Drivers and Air-quality Implications of Marine Gas-phase Emissions in Urban Coastal Regions

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This project includes a combination of field work, laboratory analysis, and modeling to improve the understanding of the complex interactions between human and natural systems at the interface of urban cities and coastal oceans. This research focuses on quantifying and characterizing factors controlling the marine emissions of trace gases in an urban coastal southern California location known to be impacted by run-off and anthropogenic emissions. The data collected in this study will be used to estimate the current and future influences of these trace gas fluxes on global climate and local air quality.This work has three primary aims: (1) Characterize the environmental drivers and anthropogenic influences controlling coastal secondary marine aerosol (SMA) precursors through controlled mesocosm experiments and in-situ measurement campaigns; (2) Integrate the gas-phase emissions characterized above into updated online coastal emissions inventories; and (3) Model impacts of the modified ocean emissions under current and future climate scenarios. The potential impacts of chemical speciation, timing, and temperature dependence identified through the field campaign and laboratory measurements will be explored using both global and regional atmospheric simulations. This effort will provide new datasets for a largely under-constrained anthropogenic-biogenic system, and lead to a subsequent improvement of emission inventories and regional and global modeling to increase the understanding of the formation of coastal secondary marine aerosols (SMA) in the atmosphere.This project includes support for a postdoctoral scholar, several graduate students, and opportunities for the involvement of citizen science.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.