Starting in 2005, Joost de Gouw has worked on the difficulty in explaining the formation of secondary organic aerosol in polluted air masses from the removal of the measured VOCs. These findings gave rise to a strong growth in the interest in SOA formation in the Atmospheric Chemistry community. To address this problem, Joost de Gouw organized field missions in Los Angeles in 2010 and in the Southeast U.S. in 2013. In Los Angeles, where the mixture of SOA precursors is rich in anthropogenic species, it was found that emissions of intermediate volatility organic compounds (IVOCs) can explain part of the discrepancy between measured and expected SOA formation. In the Southeast, where the mixture of SOA precursors are dominated by biogenic species, several mechanisms were discovered that explained enhanced SOA formation from biogenic VOCs in the presence of anthropogenic pollutants (SO2, NOx).

Collaborators

Jose Jimenez (CIRES & CU Boulder), Chuck Brock, Ann Middlebrook (NOAA & CIRES), Allen Robinson (Carnegie Mellon), Allen Goldstein (UC Berkeley), Ann-Marie Carlton (UC Irvine), Sally Ng (Georgia Tech), Patrick Hayes (Univ. Montreal), Drew Gentner (Yale), Roya Bahreini (UC Riverside)

Key Publications

• de Gouw, J. A., Middlebrook, A. M., Warneke, C., Goldan, P. D., Kuster, W. C., Roberts, J. M., Fehsenfeld, F. C., Worsnop, D. R., Canagaratna, M. R., Pszenny, A. A. P., Keene, W. C., Marchewka, M., Bertman, S. B. and Bates, T. S.: Budget of organic carbon in a polluted atmosphere: Results from the New England Air Quality Study in 2002, J. Geophys. Res.-Atmos., 110, D16305, doi:10.1029/2004JD005623, 2005.
• Gentner, D. R., Jathar, S. H., Gordon, T. D., Bahreini, R., Day, D. A., Haddad, El, I., Hayes, P. L., Pieber, S. M., Platt, S. M., de Gouw, J. A., Goldstein, A. H., Harley, R. A., Jimenez, J. L., Prévôt, A. S. H. and Robinson, A. L.: Review of Urban Secondary Organic Aerosol Formation from Gasoline and Diesel Motor Vehicle Emissions, Environ. Sci. Technol., 51(3), 1074–1093, doi:10.1021/acs.est.6b04509, 2017.
• Carlton, A. G., de Gouw, J. A., Jimenez, J. L., Ambrose, J. L., Attwood, A. R., Brown, S. S., Baker, K. R., Brock, C. A., Cohen, R. C., Edgerton, S., Farkas, C. M., Farmer, D., Goldstein, A. H., Gratz, L., Guenther, A. B., Hunt, S., Jaeglé, L., Jaffe, D. A., Mak, J., McClure, C., Nenes, A., Nguyen, T. K. V., Pierce, J. R., de Sa, S., Selin, N. E., Shah, V., Shaw, S., Shepson, P. B., Song, S., Stutz, J., Surratt, J. D., Turpin, B. J., Warneke, C., Washenfelder, R. A., Wennberg, P. O. and Zhou, X.: Synthesis of the Southeast Atmosphere Studies: Investigating Fundamental Atmospheric Chemistry Questions, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 99(3), 547–567, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0048.1, 2018.