About the Project
Project Highlights:
1. Novel use of state-of-the-art computer models & satellite data sets to examine air quality over a poorly explored region
2. Extensive training in data analysis techniques, programming skills, and high performance computing
3. Excellent opportunities for international networking
Overview :
Air-quality in Iranian cities is often much worse than, for example, more publicised air-pollution events in China, yet it has been seldom investigated; only a handful of studies exist for the Persian region.
Furthermore, emissions of pollutants gases, such as nitrogen oxides (NOx = NO2 + NO), within this region are only expected to increase in the future owing to the presence of large industrialised areas, high population densities, inefficient transport networks, and lack of regulatory air-quality controls. The main goal of this project is to use space-borne measurements of atmospheric composition and world-leading state-of-the-art models to improve our understanding of air pollution over the Persian Gulf and surrounding area, and to determine long-term changes in the region’s air-quality.
Specifically, the student will combine a chemical-transport model called GEOS-Chem with more than 10 years of satellite data to (a) determine the controlling mechanisms which influence the observed variability of major tropospheric pollutants (NOx, ozone, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, particulate aerosol matter);
(b) investigate how sectorial emissions of NOx and volatile organic compounds affect ozone production, and (c) assess how severe dust episodes affect local air-quality. They will also have the exciting opportunity to investigate a wide breadth of additional topics e.g., pollutant ship emissions along sea-lane tracks, detection of changes in air-quality due to regional conflicts, and satellite estimates of biogenic emissions from regions of irrigated desert
Funding Notes
This studentship is one of a number of fully funded studentships available to the best UK and EU candidates available as part of the NERC DTP CENTA consortium.
For more details of the CENTA consortium please see the CENTA website: www.centa.org.uk.
Applicants must meet requirements for both academic qualifications and residential eligibility: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/skills/postgrad/
Please direct informal enquiries to the project supervisor. If you wish to apply formally, please do so via: https://www2.le.ac.uk/research-degrees/funding/scieng/CSE_template
References
Further reading:
About GEOS-Chem:
http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/geos/
Web articles about air pollution in the Persian region:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20937035
http://www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/en/
https://www.youtube.com/embed/nJKgufsEgl8
Journal articles about air pollution in the Persian region:
Lelieveld et al., “Severe ozone air pollution in the Persian Gulf region”, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 9, 1393-1496, 2009
Lelieveld et al., “Abrupt recent trend changes in atmospheric nitrogen dioxide over the Middle East”, Sci. Adv., 1, e1500498, 2015