Reactivit'Air

An important part of my Academy Research Fellow project (2017-2022) funded by Academy of Finland was the development of an instrument to measure total ozone (O3) reactivity. The paper describing the method we use, based on an idea by Dr. Detlev Helmig, and developed together with his group, has just been published in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques . At the time of my proposal submission in 2016, there had been only one publication on the topic of total O3 reactivity measurement by Prof. Jun Matsumoto (Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan). I was also aware of measurements that had been done by Dr. Helmig's group that had been presented at conferences. This is why I visited Prof. Matsumoto in Tokyo in December 2017 and then went to Boulder CO, U.S.A. , with Anssi Liikanen , in January 2018. Anssi stayed almost two months to work in Dr. Helmig's laboratory, performing many tests on the total O3 reactivity monitor (TORM).   Figure 1. Left: TORM at the Toolik Field Station, Alaska

Time flies and my blog has been silent for almost a year. Several times I have been wanting to write a post, but nothing materialized. Lately, I realized that I am sometimes "out of words". Are you too? When I applied for a position as a doctoral student at the Paul Scherrer Institute in 2008, I included at the bottom of my CV two awards for young writers that I got while I was at the university. I wrote short stories in my native language, French, and submitted them to writing competitions, because I always have liked to tell stories. These were work of fiction and a couple of times, I did get a prize. I remember that, towards the end of the interview, one of the interviewers made a comment about these awards and how it's nice to know that I am good at writing. At that time, I knew that I would have to write a thesis, but I had not realized the extent to which academia relies on people writing... almost all the time! Word cloud generated by wordart.com using the text fr

In our latest publication, we investigated with total hydroxyl radical (OH) reactivity measurements our understanding of emissions from three tree species found in the boreal forest. The unexplained fraction of the reactivity remain high in some circumstances. We recently published in Biogeosciences the results of our study from 2017, where we analysed the emissions from three different trees with gas chromatographic methods and total OH reactivity instrumentation. We analysed emissions at the branch level with enclosure for birch, spruce, and pine. Our findings are that emissions do vary in amount and composition throughout the growing season and we could show, based on reactivity measurements, that the emissions are not fully characterized chemically. In particular when trees were subject to stress (that was clearly visible with, for instance, browning leaves or needles) the reactivity of the emissions increased a lot and we observed simultaneously an increase of emissions of Green L

Rather than heading to Vienna as I did last year for the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union, I attended its online replacement this year: Sharing Geoscience Online ( #shareEGU20 ). As everyone knows, online meetings should happen more often because it's better for the climate and because we do have the technology nowadays to make it happen easily. While some (including scientists) have already been taking advantage of this possibility for a while, the current pandemic is forcing almost everyone else to do the same. As most people, I happen to have been on video calls with a few people to discuss results from my research or plan upcoming measurement campaigns. However, I don't recall participating ever in an online conference before last week. I thought that I would make a short (and extremely subjective) comparison between the in-person and the online versions of the EGU General Assembly. Let me know in the comments about your own experience with this

For many, 2020 will be remembered as quite a unique year, as many around the world are affected by the coronavirus pandemic and stay home for work, schools are closed, and everyone adapt to the unusual situation. In particular, for scientists, 2020 will be the year of the cancellations of not only international conferences, but also measurement campaigns. Last year, I was trying to organise a measurement campaign in Switzerland in 2020 for my projec t, but for various reasons, this was not possible. As an alternative, we decided to bring reactivity instruments (for both OH and ozone reactivity, the very first time this combination has been ever used to our knowledge) to Pallas in the Finnish Lapland in late March. As Anssi and I were preparing for the trip, COVID-19 slowly took on the news' cycle and Switzerland got hit quite badly by the pandemic. Did we just dodged a bullet? I guess we took a lucky decision without knowing. Still the first cases of COVID-19 were reported als

After a long journey to get them published, the results of our hydroxyl radical (OH) reactivity measurements in the boreal forest in 2016 are now available in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics . The final manuscript has been substantially modified from its discussion version, mostly to improve its readability and remove unnecessary parts. The most consequential changes did not severely impact our conclusions, though. Here I give a summary of the findings from our study that includes measurements at the SMEAR II boreal forest station in Hyytiälä, Finland, from April to July 2016, as well as modelling results from our colleagues at the University of Helsinki. We found large total OH reactivity values occurred when the soil was thawing after snow melted (late April). These reactivity peaks were even higher than the high total OH reactivity values in summer (July). Comparing the total OH reactivity measured with the OH reactivity calculated from the known chemical composition at

After living here for over six years, I applied for Finnish citizenship in the spring and it was given to me on 21 August this year. In this blog post I am writing down a few personal thoughts about the process, how I feel about Finland, what this means to me now and to which extend it is related to my career. EU-citizenship Figure 1. The author as a newly naturalized EU-citizen visiting the European Parliament in Brussels for the first time. You have no idea how many people were wondering why I would apply for Finnish citizenship as a Swiss citizen. Well, it is true that Switzerland is in the Schengen area (even though it is not part of the EU) and that it was very easy to move to Helsinki in the first place. However, a few years back, before I was awarded my current fellowship, I considered alternative options to work outside of academia and as a chemist, I wondered if I could have worked for the European Chemical Agency (located in Helsinki). Except I couldn't as a Swi