I have been working hard on a manuscript dealing with the evaluation of uncertainties in measurements and model estimations and the result is now available online for discussion:
G. Kos, A. Ryzhkov, A. Dastoor, J. Narayan, A. Steffen, P. A. Ariya, and L. Zhang, Evaluation of discrepancy between measured and modeled oxidized mercury species, Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 12, 17245-17293, 2012.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/12/17245/2012/acpd-12-17245-2012.html
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Things have been incredibly busy in the weeks after my return. Some reports had to be finished and I am quite actively working on revisions of my manuscript drafts. There has been some follow-up on the Barrow campaign – nice to see some photos of the researchers continuing their work.
Meanwhile I started preparing GC-MS measurements of my own samples. I have help from a graduate student from France doing an internship in our labs! I am quite busy training her on the instrument, sample preparation, data analysis and calibration, she will be ready to start running samples in a few weeks time.
With 2 manuscripts under review I started outlining the next manuscript about my field trip to Alert. After several oral presentations and 2 posters one some aspects of my results the material has been under enough scrutiny that it can be written up.
Apart from the new data and a broad range of compounds (aromatic, oxygenated, halogenated) that I detected in Arctic air and snow I would like to focus on the transfer of species between air and snow by comparing my results with calculations using sorption coefficients. I would also like to use back-trajectory calculations again to assess the influence of the movement of air masses on VOC concentrations.
For presentation of the material I will use a few new plots that I tried for a few compounds on the posters, since they illustrate well the change of concentrations in both matrices (for a single compound at a time). With the wealth of data that I have available selecting suitable plots is a crucial task.
I am almost done with responding to the reviewer comments of the latest manuscript. There are a few things left to clarify – mostly in the microbiological part and I am waiting for a couple of suggestions from one of the co-authors. Because it is summer, we got 6 weeks instead of the usual 4 to finish our review and it seems that we are going to need it.
Anyway I have redone the figures to make the error bars more visible and I have recalculated the counting error for the observed colony forming units in the graph displaying the metabolic activity of fungal species in the presence of dicarboxylic acids. More for you to read, when the paper is finally published.
I have just been to busy during my stay in Vienna and also the weeks after my return were full of interesting events, so I have to catch up once more. Any posts from April 8 until today are postdated, anyway it should be an interesting read, because there are lots of news.
Otherwise I am busy with structuring and writing my Alert manuscript. A rough structure is done and I start replacing the bulleted lists with actual paragraphs. I have also completed a list of figures and tables that I would like to include, which usually helps me to focus on the important issues that I want to present. Things are coming along …