Atmospheric Chemistry Program Seminar: Qing Ye, NCAR

Laboratory and mechanistic studies of complex VOC oxidation systems

Dr. Qing Ye, 
NCAR Atmospheric Chemistry Observations & Modeling Lab

"Improving our knowledge of the atmospheric oxidation chemistry of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is crucial to our understanding of how air pollutants form and evolve. One major challenge in the understanding of VOC oxidation arises from the extreme complexity in the oxidation processes which convert the precursor to new oxidized products and exponentially increase the number and diversity of species in the reaction mixture. To study the complex oxidation processes, laboratory chamber experiments and mechanistic simulations are two commonly used tools that have different advantages and limitations. In this seminar, I will compare a chamber dataset on alpha-pinene oxidation with a mechanistic dataset generated by a hyper-explicit mechanism generator, GECKO-A. The measurement dataset was collected by a suite of advanced analytical instruments, with the goal of achieving a near-complete description of the reactive carbon. The measurement-mechanism comparisons on a species-to-species level and an ensemble property level will be discussed. I will then show how targeted adjustments to the mechanisms in GECKO-A affect its overall agreement with chamber observations."