News

July 2023: Congrats to Claudia Bernier and Ehsan Soleimanian on their thesis defense and earning their Ph.D.!

May 2023: Congrats to Wei Li and Travis Griggs on their thesis defense and earning their Ph.D.!

Sep 2022: New paper on Hurricane Ida's impact on air pollution

Tabitha Lee used TROPOMI satellite to detect tropospheric NO2 changes due to the landfall of Hurricane Ida on Louisiana coast on Aug 29, 2021. The paper was published on Environmental Science & Technology Letters. It is the first study using satellites to quantify the disruption of short-lived extreme weather events such as hurricanes on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and the impact was shown to be large. See this news piece on the paper.

July 2022: Congrats to Elizabeth Klovenski on her thesis defense and earning her Ph.D.!

Sep 2021: Tabitha awarded FINESST grant from NASA

Ph.D. student Tabitha Lee was awarded Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) research grant for 3 years. The grant will support her thesis research on developing new approaches of using TROPOMI data to better identify unreported emission sources of NOx. Congrats Tabitha! See this news piece on her grant.

Feb 2019: Claudia awarded NASA Fellowship

Ph.D. student Claudia Bernier was awarded a 3-year NASA STEM Fellowship to support her thesis research on coastal ozone. With the fellowship, she will spend 10 weeks each summer at NASA Langley Research Center working with her NASA Technical Advisors Drs. Guillaume Gronoff and Timothy Berkoff. She is looking forward to her LaRC visit this summer! See this news piece on her fellowship and her first publication.

Dec 2019: Group made multiple presentations at AGU in San Francisco

Six members from the group went to the 2019 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco during 9-13 Dec 2019. Our presentations are listed below. We all had a fun and fruitful week at AGU!

Yuxuan Wang (invited talk): Impact of drought on air quality
Wei Li (talk): Transport effects on ozone variability in San Antonio and Houston
Sally Wang (poster): Predicting wildfire burned area inSouth Central USusing integrated machine learning techniques
Elizabeth Klovenski (poster): Understanding Drought Perturbations on Biosphere-Atmosphere-Chemistry Relationship with GISS ModelE + MEGAN simulations
Claudia Bernier (poster): Clustering Surface Ozone Diurnal Cycles to Understand the Impact of Circulation Patterns in Houston, TX
Nan Lin (poster): Comparative study of GEOS-Chem and WRF-GC in the United States

Jun 2019: Group awarded new grants from NASA and NOAA

Yuxuan Wang received two new grants to investigate atmospheric chemistry impacts of droughts. The first grant is from NASA Atmospheric Composition Modeling and Analysis Program (ACMAP) and the objective is to improve our understanding of how biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) emissions respond to drought stress using a multitude of observations (aircraft, surface, and satellite) and modeling (GEOS-Chem). We will collaborate with Drs. Alex Guenther and Saewung Kim at UCI on the NASA project [Read more].

The second grant is from NOAA Atmospheric Chemistry Carbon Cycle and Climate (AC4) Program. With the NOAA grant, we will conduct a holistic and long-term analysis of atmospheric composition changes during droughts in the continental U.S. and with such observational constraints, we will develop process-based metrics to evaluate earth system models in simulating the coupling of drought and atmospheric composition. Our collaborators include Dr. Jun Wang from U. Iowa and GFDL.

4/8/2019: Sally defended her Ph.D. thesis!

Sally successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled "Impact of Biomass Burning on Regional Air Quality and Weather Patterns in Texas" on April 8, 2019. This is an important milestone not only for her personally but also for the group as she is the first Ph.D. graduated from our group at UH. Here is a memorable photo when Sally received a surprise party by the sweet undergraduate students in the Atmospheric Biogeochemistry lab session she's been teaching this semester.

3/1/2019: Group awarded a new grant from TCEQ

We are excited to be awarded a new grant from TCEQ to conduct synthesis analysis of mesoscale and synoptic-scale circulation patterns on ozone transport and formation in Houston and San Antonio. This project builds upon our prior work on background ozone and large-scale meteorological drivers of ozone variability in the region. It will allow us to study mesoscale circulation such as the sea breeze and assemble the mesoscale and synoptic-scale pieces into a coherent picture of the weather patterns conducive to high ozone in the Houston and San Antonio areas. Stay tuned to our progress in the Publication and Presentation page!

10/31/2018: Elizabeth wins NASA Fellowship

Ph.D. student Elizabeth Klovenski was awarded a NASA ASTAR Fellowship to study drought effects on BVOC-chemistry-climate interactions. She will primarily use the GISS ModelE, a leading earth system model. The Fellowship will support her for 3 years, including her visits and training at NASA Goddard. Congratulations! [Read more]

8/27/2018: Elizabeth participated in the Summer 2018 Big Island SO2 Survey!

Elizabeth was part of a collaborative team of UH and St. Edwards researchers that went to Hawaii and measured the SO2 plumes from the Kilauea eruption during Jun-Jul 2018. This project was funded by NASA (PI: James Flynn). She also visited the Mauna Loa Observatory! [Read more].

8/1/2018: Elizabeth awarded a grant from University of Houston Graduate School Fund

This grant recognizes the outstanding Elizabeth's outstanding academic performance and research activities and will be a boost to her future efforts. Congrats Elizabeth!

7/10/2018: Sally's first first-authored paper accepted by JGR-Atmospheres!

Congratulations to Sally! Her paper investigates the transport of fire emissions from Central America to the US Gulf coast and impacts on surface ozone and PM2.5 at several Gulf coast cities. [article].

6/1/2018: Group members awarded various scholarships

Recognized by their academic excellence during the 2017-2018 school year, Sally received the EAS Department Graduate Scholarship and NSM Alumni Scholarship, Elizabeth received the NSM Alumni Scholarship, and Claudia received the EAS Outstanding Academic Achievement- Master’s Excellence Scholarship.

5/18/2018: Group awarded seed funding from CACDS

We received Seed Funding for Advanced Computing (SeFAC) from the Center for Advanced Computing and Data Systems (CACDS).

4/30/2018: New grant from Texas Air Research Center

We were awarded a grant from Texas Air Research Center (TARC)! The project will investigate the relationships between droughts, wildland fires, and ozone pollution in Texas.

4/28/2018: Good news from EAS Research Day!

At 2018 EAS Research Day Conference and Industrial Open House, Sally presented her research on the transport of fire emissions from Central America to the US Gulf Coast and effects on Houston air quality. She won EAS Department Research Day Award for Oral Presentation (2nd place). Congratulations! [Read more].

4/3/2018: Claudia selected for the NCEP Student Internship

Being one of 10 students selected nationally for the 2018 National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Student Internship, Claudia will spend her summer at the Environmental Modeling Center in College Park, MD. Congrats Claudia! [Read more].

1/30/2018: Our new group website is up

Take a look and send us feedback!

1/25/2018: New hardware arrived and ready to be installed at UH HPC

The current cluster will be shut down on 1/30/18 for about 3 days to facilitate the installation of the new nodes.

12/11/2017: Yuxuan and Sally attended AGU in New Orleans and presented research

Sally presented a poster on the transport of Central American biomass burning emissions to the US Gulf Coast and effects on surface ozone. Yuxuan and Mark Estes (TCEQ collaborator) made an oral presentation on Houston ozone diurnal cycle (talk presented by Mark). Claudia made a substantial contribution to this work.

04/25/2017: Group received NSF grant to study Beijing winter haze chemistry

Dr. Wang collaborates with Dr. Becky Alexander's group at the University of Washington to improve sulfate and nitrate chemistry in the nested-grid GEOS-Chem to better represent the 'unique' aerosol chemistry under highly polluted winter conditions in Beijing. Read more.