Prather Research Group

After a long drive, and a backhoe to plow the access road to the sampling site, the Prather Group's Mobile Lab has been successfully deployed at the Sugar Pine Dam in Tahoe National Forest near Foresthill, CA.  The group will be investigating the interplay of aerosols and precipitation in California, while another team of Prather Group members deploys a similar setup in Mariposa, CA as part of the CalWater field campaign, a collaboration with  NOAA, the California Energy Commission, and the US Geological Survey.  Jessie, Liz, and Doug will be making continuous measurements wi

Professor Prather will receive the 2010 American Chemical Society Creative Advances in Environental Sciency and Technology and was selected as a 2010 American Geophysical Union Fellow and a 2009 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

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Meagan and Liz are currently in the field with ATOFMS Elwood at the Dirty Socks site in Owens Lake, CA. They are looking at dust particles - specifically how the chemistry of the dust changes as it reacts with atmospheric gases and how these changes affect the particles’ ability to nucleate cloud droplets.
http://ovcweb.org/
http://www.gbuapcd.org/data/owenslakedata.htm

Two postdoctoral fellow positions available in the Prather group to study the impact of aerosols on climate. Three upcoming projects in California this coming year will investigate and characterize atmospheric aerosols and their impact on clouds and regional climate. One study will focus on determining how soot or black carbon is impacting our climate. A person with a strong radiative forcing or optics background would be ideally suited to this project. Two other projects will focus on atmospheric and precipitation studies.

Kerri Pratt presented her research from her dissertation on Monday, 6/29/09.  The abstract of her presentation is given below.

Professor Prather has a viewpoint in ChemSusChem  discussing what we know about how aerosols change climate and how this knowledge is changing as analytical techniques improve.

Our two senior undergraduates just graduated! In addition to graduation, Maggie received the Urey Award for academic excellence in chemistry!

Maggie will continue her studies at Berkeley and Brandon his at Santa Barbara. Best of luck them in their future!

A recent paper published in Environmental Science & Technology attributes an increase of particulate matter during regional transport events in San Diego from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. This particulate matter is mainly soot, vanadium, iron, and nickel, sulfate, and nitrate, from ships, refinaries, and port traffic.

A paper published in Nature Geoscience "In situ detection of biological particles in cloud ice-crystals," shows results from the Aircraft-ATOFMS used to chemically identify the chemistry of ice-cloud crystals in high altitude clouds. This is the first direct detection of biological particles, internally mixed with dust, in ice clouds.