As previously discussed in one my prior blog post, my main postdoctoral project is KORUS–AQ. Briefly, this was a campaign held in South Korea to investigate the impacts of local emissions from a megacity versus transport on the air quality and the impacts to climate.
A typical component of any large research campaign, like this one, is to attend a science team meeting. Prior to this meeting, the various research groups are busy with (1) ensuring their data has undergone quality control and assurance, which may include further calibrations, inspecting for instrument issues, et cetera; and, (2) investigating potential scientific questions to pursue. The science team meeting, which occurs between 6 – 12 months after the campaign, provides the first opportunity for the all the research groups to come together, to discuss each others’ findings, to create potential collaborations, and to provide an opportunity to think about how to further investigate their own data.
For this meeting, our South Korean collaborators hosted us. They held the meeting at the National Institute of Meteorological Sciences, on Jeju Island. The meeting was 5 days, and during the time, there were between 100 – 150 presentations from the various groups about their findings. Overall, the meeting was extremely successful and useful, as it provided an opportunity for me to initiate numerous collaborations concerning the chemistry of particulate matter that I am pursuing. Also, the presentations provided information that I will use to investigate my data in other ways to determine if my findings hold-up or if I need to think about the results in different ways.
Various researchers that have either participated in or assisted with the NASA Student Airborne Research Program, who were also at the KORUS-AQ meeting. I’m the one with a beard and glasses on the left. Picture provided by Emily Schaller from the NASA SARP progrm (https://tinyurl.com/zaw7c2u).
Now, I will be spending time to use the new information I learned during the meeting to finalize my results and to start writing papers about my results. I will be hopefully presenting these results at various scientific meetings this year, including the American Geophysical Union meeting. Also, I’ll be preparing new results to show at the next KORUS-AQ Science Team Meeting, which is supposed to take place next year.
