Laboratory Characterization and Modeling of Stratospheric Aerosol Heterogeneous Chemistry for SAI

Understanding and quantifying the stratospheric heterogeneous chemistry of aerosols proposed for use in stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is essential for predicting the impact of SAI on stratospheric ozone and other atmospheric chemical systems. Despite the well-known risk of ozone depletion from introducing aerosols to the stratosphere, the stratospheric chemistry of many aerosol types which have been proposed for SAI, other than sulfate, is largely unknown. We will use the aerosol flow tube technique (AFT) with online chemical ionization mass spectrometry (CIMS) and aerosol mass spectrometry to investigate the products and kinetics of reactive gas uptake (including HCl, HBr, HNO3, H2SO4, N2O5) to proposed SAI materials at stratospheric temperatures. This work will produce essential data and insights for improving model representations of the impacts of SAI on atmospheric chemistry.

V. Faye McNeill is a professor and vice chair in the Department of Chemical Engineering and a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. She is also an associate member of the Earth Institute Faculty and principal investigator of the Columbia University Clean Air Toolbox for Cities Initiative. She received her B.S. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1999 and her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005, where she was a NASA Earth System Science Fellow. From 2005–2007, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences. She received the NSF CAREER Award and the American Chemical Society (ACS) Petroleum Research Fund (PRF) Doctoral New Investigator Award in 2009. She was the recipient of the Kenneth T. Whitby Award of American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR) in 2015 and the Mellichamp Emerging Leaders Lectureship at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018. She was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2023. She is the associate editor in charge of Atmospheric Chemistry for the ACS Earth and Space Chemistry. McNeill was a co-editor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics from 2007–2017 and has served in multiple elected officer positions in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU), including president of AAAR (2023–2024). She is an appointed member of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) panel on atmospheric chemical kinetic data evaluation.