What Aerosols Can Tell Us About Climate
Trish Quinn ’82 examines sea spray, dust, and pollutants in our atmosphere to better understand their climate effects.
Trish Quinn ’82 has taken dozens of cruises in her life. Not the ones you’re probably thinking, with a water park and karaoke and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Rather, her cruises have involved investigating atmospheric particulates, called aerosols, over the world’s oceans—naturally occurring ones, like sea salt and dust, and human-made ones like sulfate from power plants, organic carbon from biogenic emissions, and soot from diesel engines—and seeing how they and their properties affect the climate and air quality. For this work, Trish has traveled all over the world by ship as a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Data on aerosols over the oceans is key for scientists to learn more about where these particulates are warming or cooling the planet. NOAA uses the data to look at the processing of particles in the atmosphere, and modelers often use them to improve their climate simulations of aerosols, too. “There’s not very much data over the ocean, so it’s a pretty unique dataset,” Trish says.
When she first went to college, Trish wouldn’t have thought she’d end up conducting research on month-long boat excursions after graduation. In fact, at first she wanted to be a literature major. But she fell in love with chemistry, particularly with how objective it was: unlike with writing, you were always either right or wrong. And she enjoyed the element of mystery when faced with a difficult-to-solve problem, and then once it was solved, the storytelling aspect of explaining how you came to your conclusions. After writing her thesis on protein folding under Prof. Phyllis Kosen [chemistry 1981–83], Trish went on to earn her PhD at the University of Washington, and then began working with NOAA.
After 35 years, Trish is hoping to stay in the field long enough to continue seeing it advance. In particular, she’s interested in marine cloud brightening, a modification technique that seeks to use aerosols to increase the reflectivity of certain clouds and potentially offset some of the effects of climate change. When aerosols mix into low clouds, they can cause the clouds to brighten and reflect more sunlight into space, which has a cooling effect on the climate. As air quality restrictions become more strict, there’s less concentration of these aerosols in the atmosphere, and though this is healthier for humans and local ecosystems, having fewer aerosols also contributes to climate warming because of their cooling effect. Atmospheric scientists still aren’t sure how much of a cooling effect aerosols have on the climate—it could be anywhere from 0.2 degrees Celsius to 1 degree Celsius—but if the effect is substantial, removing aerosols could rapidly warm the climate. Marine cloud brightening proposes sending sea salt particles into low-lying clouds within localized areas, in hopes of helping to cool the climate. Trish and a group of 30 other scientists put together a consensus physical science research roadmap for determining how to evaluate marine cloud brightening in the future. In the meantime, Trish is still adding to her list of over 30 ocean adventures—next stop, the tropical eastern Pacific in 2026.
Tags: Alumni, Climate, Sustainability, Environmental, Research