Description:

Tackling Chemical Complexity: Approaches to Characterizing Unresolved Complex Mixtures and Their Impacts on Air Quality

Organic compounds in the atmosphere comprise a very complex mixture of 10,000’s of organic gases and particles that span wide ranges of volatilities, polarities and functionalities, and as a whole play key roles in atmospheric chemistry and air quality. Through advances in sampling and measurement instrumentation, I have enabled offline, detailed chemical characterization of these organic mixtures with very high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry and soft chemical ionization. I present several policy-relevant results focused on emissions of reactive precursors from motor vehicles and secondary organic aerosol (SOA), as well as breaking results on emissions from the processing of Canadian oil sands, which were recently shown to be a large regional source of SOA.