Mian Chin NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Winner of the 2024 Nordberg Award

 
"Modeling of Atmospheric Aerosols: Opportunities, Excitements, and Challenges"
  

Aerosols are small particles suspended in the air that have many effects on Earth's environment. Aerosols are generated from both natural and anthropogenic sources, including desert dust, sea salt, volcanic eruptions, biogenic and biological sources, wild and human-caused fires, and fossil fuel/biofuel combustion from human activity. Satellite and ground-based remote-sensing observations over the past several decades have not only provided global observations of aerosols but also greatly promoted the development and advancement of atmospheric aerosol models. The models, in turn, offer a wide range of research and applications, from addressing the air pollution effects on air quality to accessing climate forcing of aerosols and from helping designing satellite retrieval algorithms to data assimilation. In this talk, I will share my journey in modeling of atmospheric aerosols in the past three decades, give examples of how models work with remote sensing and in-situ data in a synergistic way, and discuss the challenges we are still facing in both observation and modeling sides to unravel aerosols' effects on our environment.

About the Speaker


Mian Chin is a Physical Scientist in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, concentrating on atmospheric model development and data analysis. After receiving a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Science at Georgia Institute of Technology (1992), she took a Postdoctoral Fellow position at Harvard University for three years then moved to GSFC in 1995, where she was first a Research Scientist in Universities Space Research Association (1995-1997) then a Visiting Research Scientist affiliated with Georgia Institute of Technology (1997-2003) before entering government service in 2003. Her current research topics include aerosol-cloud-radiation-climate interactions, regional and global air quality, transport of aerosols and trace gases, aerosol impacts on global energy balance, and analysis of data from satellite, ground-based, and airborne observations. Mian has served in the leadership roles in several internationally coordinated projects, including the Aerosol Comparisons between Observations and Models (AeroCom), Atmospheric Composition and the Asian Monsoon (ACAM), and Models, In-situ, and Remote Sensing of Aerosols (MIRA). She is also a Science Advisory Board member of NCAR's and DOE's modeling programs. Mian is a recipient of Medal of Exceptional Achievement from NASA, Exceptional Achievement Award from NASA GSFC, and Robert H. Goddard Award for Science from GSFC, and is a Fellow of American Geophysical Union (AGU) and American Meteorological Society (AMS).



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