Reactivit'Air

Figure 1. Wall projection in the Think Corner of the University of Helsinki during INAR Climate Festival (Picture: Arnaud Praplan, CC-BY-4.0 ) The INAR Climate Festival took place on 25 May in the Think Corner of the University of Helsinki. It was a large event meant to inaugurate the new Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research (INAR) and present its important research to society.  Among the guests for the inauguration were former President Tarja Halonen, Jukka Kola (Rector of the University of Helsinki), Kaarle Hämeri ( Chancellor of the University of Helsinki) , Juhani Damski ( FMI Director General) , Jari Gustafsson ( Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment) and Erja Heikkinen (Science Adviser at the Ministry of Education and Culture), displaying the many connections and large impact of INAR in society: education, research, business. All guests were stressing how INAR is an important platform to understand and po...

The Arctic is predicted to warm up at a quicker pace than other parts of the globe due to climate change. Therefore dramatic changes are expected to happen in that region in the future and scientists express an increasing interest for this region.  As one of our main research interest is focused about substances released into the atmosphere by vegetation (biogenic volatile organic compounds, BVOCs) spring always marks the time when our instruments get to travel again to places after spending the winter in the laboratory for testing and optimization purposes. This year our group is setting up measurements of BVOCs (and other VOCs) and of hydroxyl radical (OH) reactivity in the Arctic. The Finnish Meteorological Institute has been active at Pallas in the Finnish Arctic as early as 1935. Since 1994 Pallas-Sodankylä is established as one of the global observation station of the Global Atmospheric Watch (GAW) programme . The station has one node in Sodankylä at FMI's Arctic Resear...

International collaboration is a cornerstone of modern science. This is why funding agencies generally make mobility an important part of any funding application. Academy of Finland is not different and my Academy Research Fellow project includes several instances of mobility. As I was preparing my proposal including ozone reactivity measurements, I was made aware of the unpublished work from Prof. Detlev Helmig and his team on this topic at the  Atmospheric Research Laboratory (ARL) , part of the  Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After contacting Prof. Helmig, he agreed to host a laboratory visit in order for me to get familiar with their method. As the project got funded, the visit was settled for the beginning of 2018. Therefore, after visiting Prof. Matsumoto in Tokyo , I embarked on another trip, this time to the United States of America, and this time together with Anssi . I stayed for three weeks the...

Prof. Jun Matsumoto ( Waseda University , Tokyo, Japan) is one of the few researcher that has published about his experimental research on ozone reactivity. I recently visited his laboratory on the Tokorozawa Campus to discuss his research. As I was reading about ozone reactivity measurements for proposals, a name stood out: Prof. Jun Matsumoto. He published results from ozone reactivity measurements a few years ago (Matsumoto, 2014) and I contacted him to ask if he would be wiling to host me for a visit at the beginning of the project to familiarize myself with his method. He agreed and as the proposal got funded , I started to organize my trip to Tokyo, which took place at the end of November and beginning of December. Prof. Matsumoto met me on the first day at the Tokorozawa train station, next to my hotel, and we traveled together with train and bus to the university campus. There we first discussed about the current state of his research and on the following day, we visited ...

The annual seminar of the Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Atmospheric Science – From Molecular and Biological Processes to the Global Climate led by Academician Markku Kulmala took place in Helsinki last week from 4 to 6 October 2017. The seminar offers a unique opportunity for participants to share their work and discover the work of collaborators beyond their immediate field of research to foster innovative future research. What is a Centre of Excellence? Funding provided by the Academy of Finland to CoEs aims at creating research and training networks to achieve long-term (and even risky!) objectives. The Academy of Finland's Centres of Excellence (CoE) are the flagships of Finnish research. They are close to or at the very cutting edge of science in their fields, carving out new avenues for research, developing creative research environments and training new talented researchers for the Finnish research system and Finnish business and industry. (Source:  A...

Today we are pleased to welcome M.Sc. Anssi Liikanen as a new member of the Air Quality group at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. Anssi starts his PhD studies during which he will develop ozone reactivity measurements and conduct field measurements. As a part of my  REAC-FORTE  project (Academy of Finland, grant 307797 ), ozone reactivity will be used as a tool to assess our understanding of tree emissions and air chemistry in forest air at high latitude (Finland) and high altitude (Switzerland). Biogenic volatile organic compounds emitted by vegetation, such as isoprene and monoterpenes, have a double carbon-carbon bond in their structures, enabling reaction with ozone. By comparing the total ozone reactivity with the reactivity expected from known emissions in combination with other measurement techniques, we will be able to know how much of the chemical composition of forest air is still not well understood. Anssi's background in atmospheric sciences with a focu...

As part of my postdoctoral work at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, I developed a new implementation of the Comparative Reactivity Method to measure total hydroxyl (OH) reactivity from ambient air and emissions. The description of the instrument and results from our first study in Helsinki to test the instrument's performances have been published in Atmospheric Environment (open access). The total OH reactivity (also called total OH loss rate) is a measure of how much reactive compounds are present in the air. A higher amount of compounds reduces the lifetime of OH. It appears that the total OH reactivity in forested environments is higher than expected from known measured compounds, mostly volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from the vegetation. In order to study this missing OH sink also observed in the summer in the boreal forest (Sinha et al., 2010; Nölscher et al., 2012) during various seasons, Dr. Heidi Hellén proposed to develop an instrument based on the ...