Joost de Gouw participated in three studies at the U.S. Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana:

• SMURFS in 2009
• FLAME III in 2009
• FIREX in 2016

These studies were aimed at characterizing the composition of wildfire smoke, and their chemical transformations. He collaborated on the analysis of smoke by acetate CIMS and discovered the emission of isocyanic acid (HNCO). He collaborated on several studies that looked at formation of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) from biomass burning VOCs and found that SOA was much more efficiently formed than could be explained from the measured VOCs. He found that the release of VOCs from biomass burning can be well described by a combination of high- and low-temperature pyrolysis products. He collaborated on the OH and NO3 oxidation of catechol in a chamber, which is an important SOA formation pathway in wildfire plumes.

Collaborators

Matt Coggon, Jessica Gilman, Jim Roberts, Patrick Veres, Carsten Warneke (NOAA & CIRES), Bob Yokelson (Univ. Montana), Abby Koss (MIT), Kanako Sekimoto (Yokohama City Univ.), Bin Yuan (Jinan Univ.), Allen Robinson (Carnegie Mellon), Zack Finewax, Jose Jimenez, Paul Ziemann (CIRES & CU Boulder)

Key Publications

• Roberts, J. M., Veres, P. R., Cochran, A. K., Warneke, C., Burling, I. R., Yokelson, R. J., Lerner, B. M., Gilman, J. B., Kuster, W. C., Fall, R. and de Gouw, J. A.: Isocyanic acid in the atmosphere and its possible link to smoke-related health effects, PNAS, 108, 8966–8971, doi:10.1073/pnas.1103352108, 2011.
• Finewax, Z., de Gouw, J. A. and Ziemann, P. J.: Identification and Quantification of 4-Nitrocatechol Formed from OH and NO3 Radical-Initiated Reactions of Catechol in Air in the Presence of NOx: Implications for Secondary Organic Aerosol Formation from Biomass Burning, Environ. Sci. Technol., 52, 1981–1989, doi:10.1021/acs.est.7b05864, 2018.
• Sekimoto, K., Koss, A. R., Gilman, J. B., Selimovic, V., Coggon, M. M., Zarzana, K. J., Yuan, B., Lerner, B. M., Brown, S. S., Warneke, C., Yokelson, R. J., Roberts, J. M. and de Gouw, J. A.: High- and low-temperature pyrolysis profiles describe volatile organic compound emissions from western US wildfire fuels, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 18, 9263–9281, doi:10.5194/acp-2018-52, 2018.