I taught a class at McGill today – ATOC-210: Simple, straight forward and good fun! Best was that I could focus on the teaching rather than the administrative issues that tend to take over during the semester 🙂 Topic was chapter 3 – Seasonal and Daily Temperatures
All my regular teaching at Concordia University is now done. This term is dedicated to research and it looks as if I am going to be busy (I am already).
After the Arctic Change conference I am finally back to marking the fall semester exams. Luckily I am almost done with grading exams of the “Analytical Chemistry I” course (80 exams), but there is still a lot of work ahead grading the 180 “General Chemistry” exams. The experience gained in the past few years is now quite useful for speedy grading.
Last week I attended the Arctic Change meeting in Quebec City – an excellent conference organised by ArcticNet with over 900 participants presenting their results on Arctic Research. I gave a talk that was well attended and got quite a few interesting questions – most of the issues discussed I have been thinking of myself for quite a while:
T14. Quantifying the Carbon Balance of Arctic Ecosystems at Various Scales: Gregor Kos & Parisa Ariya, “(Semi)volatile Organic Compounds at Alert, Nunavut – Snow Pack and Boundary Layer Composition”
The meeting had a strong socio-cultural component to disseminate the results among those most affected by the research – the Inuit of the North. Furthermore, awareness was raised that the environment the research takes place in is the home of other people. The need for community outreach and making the results relevant for the local people was stressed often – and rightfully so.
0800h: C41C-0540
Snowpack and Air Interactions of (Semi)volatile Organic Compounds at Alert, Nunavut
Kos, G (gregor.kos@mcgill.ca) and Ariya, PA (parisa.ariya@mcgill.ca), McGill University, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, 805 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC H3A 2K6, Canada.
Eighteen different (semi)volatile organic compounds (halogenated, aromatic and oxygenates) were determined in surface snow (0-10~cm) together with concurrent measurements of surface air samples. Subsequently, atmosphere-snow interactions were investigated. Samples were collected in the Canadian Arctic (Alert, Nunavut; 82° 29′ 58″ N, 62° 20′ 05″ W) between May 22 and June 2, 2006 during the snowmelt and rising temperatures. Snow samples analysed on site using solid-phase micro-extraction with gas chromatography and flame ionisation detection (GC/FID) and air samples analysed after transfer to Montreal employing a home-built cryo-trap GC/FID system showed a drop in concentration below the detection limit for a number of compounds (e.g. trichloroethene, benzene) in snow on May 30 that corresponded to a sudden increase in ground ozone concentrations and a shift in the origin auf air masses passing the sampling location 72 hrs prior to the sampling event from polar to South-Westerly source regions. Additionally, the warming of the boundary layer and subsequently the snow pack was accompanied by a transformation from dendritic to highly metamorphous snow. Sorption coefficient were used for the estimation of acetone concentrations in snow from air data and vice versa and comparison with measured values showed discrepancies of up to 3 orders of magnitude, indicating highly non-equilibrium conditions. Attempts were made to evaluate the gas/snow interactions using several thermodynamic calculations, the results of which will be discussed.
P. A. Ariya, J. Sun, N. A. Eltouny, E. D. Hudson, C. T. Hayes and G. Kos; Physical and Chemical Characterization of Bioaerosols – Implications for Nucleation processes, IRPC – International Reviews in Physical Chemistry.
Now in press! I updated my publication list (online and pdf) as well!
I will be going and presenting to a few meetings in the coming weeks and months –
AGU Fall meeting 2009/San Francisco (December 2008)
Arctic Change Conference 2008/Quebec City (December 2008)
CMOS Congress 2009/Halifax (June 2009)
I have to say the past months have been extremely busy – although I am well prepared, teaching 250 students is quite time consuming, because anything else than lecture preparation takes considerably more time than teaching smaller classes. That includes office hours, email requests, exam marking,….
My research on the other hand keeps me busy as well. I co-authored a review on bioaerosols that was revised under quite a bit of pressure with the deadline coming up fast. With other manuscripts being out for review by co-authors or or journal editors this kept me quite busy! So – here in more detail:
Research
Teaching
So – no surprise I get so little time to continue writing my blog! 🙂
Quite an interesting presentation by one of the student counsellors at Concordia University! Information on what drives students today – their strengths and weaknesses. Explained quite well some of the behaviour that I see in class and during office hours!
Link: Generation Me
Next week the new semester will start and so will the lectures I will be teaching part-time at Concordia University in the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department. This year I will teach a section of General Chemistry (168 students!) and Analytical Chemistry I (76 students). Since I taught the latter before, I was not as busy as in the past, and support for the GenChem lecture has been great as well!
Course websites are up and running and the first lecture notes together with course outlines posted (sorry, authorized users only) 😉
I am ready!
Still busy comparing and interpreting my measurement data with 3rd party measurements – very interesting, but tedious as well. I have obtained ground ozone data from Alert that was recorded during my own measurement campaign and the data confirm the trend that I already observed with column ozone data:
There is a correlation between the depletion event that I observed for the measured VOC species in air and snow and sharply increasing ozone concentrations near ground: Another indicator that VOC in near surface snow contribute to atmospheric processes.