I actually started off in fundamental particle physics, so working at
CERN in Geneva, and
that was really exciting, I loved the research environment, I loved the work, but
most people who work there are really kind of motivated by these very abstract
fundamental problems or the beauty of a mathematical equation, and I'm so happy
people like that exist, but it's not me. I'm more excited by
tangible problems, things that we can relate to society, to human needs and problems
problems and so moving towards the atmosphere, looking at air
quality and climate just made more sense for what I'm personally
motivated by. I'm measuring the number and size of aerosol particles.
Aerosols are any small solid or liquid drop that's suspended in the air
so in the atmosphere that we fly through.
They can come from multiple different sources, so they could be
desert dust that's blown up into the atmosphere
and the little bits of sand stay there
or it could be sea spray blown up, but you can also get
things like particles forming out of the gas phase to make solid or liquid drops
in situ in the atmosphere. And those are the really small ones, we're quite interested in measuring those.
The reason we care about aerosols in the atmosphere is
they're affecting climate, they're affecting the radiative budget, and even though they're quite
a small effect in there when you compare it to things like greenhouse gases, they're one of the less
well-understood ones, and so the better we can start understanding these aerosols,
where they are, how they move around the atmosphere, how they're transformed
the smaller the uncertainties we have on our climate predictions.
Also aerosols are really important for human health and so we want to be able to
predict where we've got high concentrations of them, what they're made of
and all of the things that might be impacting health, and so it's really interesting for us
to measure them, especially this whole sort of global pattern that we can capture on ATom.
And really see where that's happening and potentially why it's happening. Where the
window would normally be on a plane we have like a metal window plate, and on that, we have a custom inlet
that brings in air without losing or changing the particles that are present in it.
And then this goes through a system of different tubes to bring it to all of the different instruments
in our suite. And we need multiple instruments because aerosols can range
hugely in size from just a huge nanometers in size
right up to many microns, and so you have use different techniques to meaure them
in different sizes.