Hamish Gordon
Carnegie Mellon University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Tiny airborne particles help clouds form, and clouds strongly affect how much sunlight Earth reflects. To know how much humans have changed climate, scientists need to know how cloudy and particle-rich the pre-industrial atmosphere was.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Chemistry
Engineering
- Topics
new particle formation
aerosols
aerosol-cloud interactions
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2030
What they work on
- Develop a new parameterization of atmospheric new particle formation that accounts for temperature and ions, using CERN CLOUD chamber data and field measurements, and evaluate it in climate models.
- Investigate how organic material from plant-emitted volatile organic compounds drives particle formation with and without sulfuric acid, ammonia and ions.
- Use a land surface model with simulated fires to test whether new particle formation and plant emissions buffer aerosol variability from biomass burning.
- Constrain pre-industrial cloud droplet concentrations and aerosol radiative forcing by simulating 1850–1950 across meteorological regimes and testing models against today's atmosphere.
More about the research
New particle formation (NPF), the birth of new aerosol particles from gases, is poorly captured in most global climate models. This gap adds uncertainty to estimates of aerosols' role in climate change.
Why it matters
Uncertainty about aerosol–cloud interactions is a major reason climate projections vary. Better representation of new particle formation and a tighter estimate of pre-industrial cloudiness could narrow estimates of how much aerosols have offset or changed warming. This could give climate modelers and policymakers more reliable numbers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Richard Flagan
California Institute of Technology, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop molecular-level descriptions of how new atmospheric particles form and grow, using controlled experiments in the 26 cubic meter CLOUD chamber at CERN with regulated temperature and relative humidity.
Timothy Bates
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Extend the 15-year Utqiaġvik record of submicron inorganic aerosol components, and analyze and archive 12 years of filter samples to build a nearly 30-year record.
Earle Williams
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Earth & Environmental Science
Resolve the global circuits paradox by measuring the DC global circuit (ionospheric potential) and the AC global circuit (Schumann resonances) at the same time, during the daily hours when Africa and the Americas each dominate.
The school
Carnegie Mellon University: 28 labs on PI Pages, $505M a year on research, 346 research doctorates a year.
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