Emma Yates Presents at NASA-ARC Early Career Seminar Series

Emma Yates Presents at NASA-ARC Early Career Seminar Series : Measurements of California Forest Fires and the AJAX Project

On Thursday August 27, 2015 Dr. Emma Yates of BAER Institute was one of three featured speakers at the NASA Ames Early Career Seminar Series. Her talk, “Pulling Results Out of Thin Air – Four Years of Ozone and Greenhouse Gas Measurements by the Alpha Jet Experiment (AJAX)”, gave an overview of this unique airborne platform for conducting atmospheric sampling. Unlike other NASA science aircraft, AJAX is based at Moffett Field and is available to the NASA-ARC based AJAX science team throughout the year. Over the last few years, the team has been able to conduct science flights multiple times a month to sample vertical profiles at selected sites in California and Nevada, providing long-term data records at these sites. The team has produced a dataset of atmospheric ozone, carbon dioxide, methane and meteorological parameters from near the surface to 8000 m since January 2011. Dr. Yates also presented measurements of these important trace gases taken during California forest fires. AJAX is positioned to launch with short notice and can conduct sampling flights in rapid response to extreme events such as the 2013 Yosemite Rim fire. Through the AJAX project, Dr. Yates is making significant contributions to the study of photochemical ozone production, the impacts of extreme events on western US air quality, and the quantification of important emission sources such as wildfires, urban outflow, dairies and oil and gas operations.

For more information on the AJAX project: http://geo.arc.nasa.gov/ajax/ajax_index.html