Investigation of chemical properties and transport phenomena associated with pollutants in the atmospheric boundary layer

Under the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is required to determine which air pollutants are harmful to human health, then regulate, monitor and establish criteria levels for these pollutants. To accomplish this and for scientifi c advancement, integration of knowledge from several disciplines is required including: engineering, atmospheric science, chemistry and public health. Recently, a shift has been made to establish interdisciplinary research groups to better understand the atmospheric processes that govern the transport of pollutants and chemical reactions of species in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). The primary reason for interdisciplinary collaboration is the need for atmospheric processes to be treated as a coupled system, and to design experiments that measure meteorological, chemical and physical variables simultaneously so forecasting models can be improved (i.e., meteorological and chemical process models).