Global Environmental Change Early- and Mid-career Award Webinar Series – II
Global Environmental Change Section Presents three Early Career Awards and Piers J. Seller Mid-Career Award each year to recognize the outstanding contribution from early/mid-career section members in the field of global environmental change. This Award Lecture series will feature and celebrate award recipients’ work. We invite all AGU community members to join us for this lecture series.
The second lecture features two 2021 Global Environmental Change award recipients – Dr. Bin Zhao (Tsinghua University) and Dr. Charles Koven (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab).
"Aerosols in the climate system: from the initial formation to the impact on clouds" (Dr. Bin Zhao)
Aerosol pollution is responsible for over three million premature deaths annually around the world. However, many processes governing the formation and evolution of aerosols, such as new-particle formation, particle growth, and the production and aging of organic aerosol compositions, are still inadequately understood and poorly represented in atmospheric models. Besides, aerosols many have important effects on clouds and the Earth’s climate, which are however still subject to large uncertainty. In this talk, I will describe some recent work to understand and model the chemistry processes governing aerosol formation, as well as their impacts on cloud condensation nuclei and convective and ice clouds in various environments.
Bio: Dr. Bin Zhao is an Assistant Professor at the School of Environment, Tsinghua University. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua University in 2010 and 2015, respectively. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar and Assistant Researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles during 2015–2019 and subsequently worked as an Earth Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory from 2019 to June 2021. His research focuses on the sources and formation processes of atmospheric aerosols, and the interactions and coordinated control of aerosol pollution and climate change.
"The long tail of the carbon cycle: permafrost and big trees in a changing world" (Dr. Charles Koven)
Most of the world’s carbon resides in long-lived carbon reservoirs within soils and plants, with permafrost-affected soils and the trunks of large trees as the largest carbon pools in each of these domains. In contrast, much of the historical focus of terrestrial carbon cycle models has been on faster-cycling ecosystem components such as leaves that determine the bulk of the exchange between the land surface and atmosphere. In this talk, I’ll describe some efforts to understand and model the specific dynamics that govern these longer-lived carbon pools, and how consideration of them may change our understanding of carbon cycle feedbacks from the terrestrial system.
Bio: Dr. Charlie Koven is a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the 2021 recipient of Piers J. Sellers GEC Mid-Career Award. He studies the role of terrestrial ecosystems in governing climate feedback.