University of Ottawa - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba Joint Research Program in Atmospheric Chemistry

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Air pollution plays a significant role in worldwide morbidity and mortality, being the third most important risk factor behind high blood pressure and smoking. It is estimated to be responsible for 11.65% of all deaths annually. In Canada, air quality is of concern in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, the Lower Fraser Valley in BC, and in the Southern Atlantic region. The Government of Canada estimates that 14,600 premature deaths per year are linked to air pollution. The number of asthma symptom days in Canada is around 2.7 million with air pollution estimated to cost the Canadian economy $114 billion per year. Ambitious net-zero emission goals are a key component in combating climate change; being able to predict air quality outcomes of reactive organic carbon is crucial for targeting species to improve global and domestic regulation. Over the past 30 years spectroscopy has provided many of the answers to fundamental questions in combustion and atmospheric science, but these studies are best undertaken under single reaction conditions in controlled environments due to the difficulty of deconvolving the spectroscopic signatures of related species in complex mixtures. Conventional reactors are typically incapable of observing low concentration intermediates in the reaction process. Thus, new approaches are required that take advantage of increasing detection selectivity under more relevant reaction conditions. This international collaboration will study the degradation and reactivity of reactive organic carbon from multiple directions: spectroscopy, mass spectrometry and surface science. In this case, the sum will be greater than the parts, with the atmospheric fate of a target system being explored at high and low pressures and from the dilute gas phase to the condensed phase, illuminating the fundamental reactions of these molecules with unprecedented precision.