Jian Wang, a professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering and director of the Center for Aerosol Science and Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, won a $766,552 grant from NASA for new research on Arctic aerosols. Wang will take high-resolution measurements of aerosol size distribution and analyze aerosol properties to understand how aerosols impact Arctic climate change.
As part of the Arctic Radiation-Cloud-Aerosol-Surface Interaction Experiment (ARCSIX), a mission in NASA's Airborne Science Program using two research aircraft, Wang will provide aerosol measurements to address high-priority science questions related to the spatial variation of the aerosol field and its impact on clouds and radiation. He also will conduct post-mission data analyses to investigate aerosol properties, sources and processes in the summertime Arctic.
NASA's Airborne Science Program gives researchers access to satellite data providing high-resolution temporal and spatial data on aerosols and enables them to couple local data with global satellite observations. Combining data from various scales supports a better understanding of the complete Earth system.
