Hi Everyone,

 

Some of you might be interested in this week’s departmental colloquium in Chemistry. 

Please see the below:

 

 

 

 

Title:  On the lifetime of nitrogen oxides at Earth's surface

 

Speaker: Ronald C. Cohen

Department of Chemistry and Department of Earth and Planetary Science

University of California, Berkeley

 

Time: Friday October 20th, 2017

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM

 

Location: Lash Miller, Room 158

80 St. George Street, Toronto

(Accessibility information can be found here: http://osm.utoronto.ca/bookings/f?p=210:1:1555185610772801::NO::: )

 

Abstract: Textbooks offer descriptions of two limiting cases governing the chemistry of the atmosphere and the lifetime of nitrogen oxides. In remote environments at low NOx (NOx=NO+NO2), the NOx lifetime is long and is set by the reaction of OH with NO2 to form HNO3. In urban environments at high NOx, the lifetime is again set by the reaction of OH with NO2. In this talk I discuss how these limiting cases provide little insight into the intermediate regime that is most common on the continents. In this regime the lifetime of NOx is governed by the reaction of RO2 with NO.

 

Speaker Biography: Ronald Cohen earned a BA with from Wesleyan University (1985) and a Ph.D in Chemistry from UC Berkeley (1991) working on high resolution spectroscopy of molecular clusters and radicals. As a postdoctoral fellow and research associate at Harvard he worked on stratospheric photochemistry (1991-1996). He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1995 where he is currently a Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Earth & Planetary Science, and Associate Dean for Research Administration. He is also a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Professor Cohen's research focuses on developing and applying new experimental and modeling strategies for understanding the chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere now and in the past and for predicting future changes. http://cohen.cchem.berkeley.edu/

 

Poster is attached.