Research Overview

The ocean and atmosphere form a complex system that has significant impacts on Earth’s climate. To improve our understanding of the mechanisms that govern the ocean-atmosphere system and to achieve more precise predictions regarding the system’s feedback to the changing climate, major efforts in observation, experimentation, and modeling are required. Within this scope, our main scientific questions of interest are:

• Does sunlight-irradiated surface seawater produce organic carbon compounds that escape to the atmosphere?

• Do climate-relevant organic compounds play key roles in microbial cycling of dissolved organic carbon in oceanic waters?

• Are photochemical processes occurring in marine aerosols essential to the chemistry of the atmosphere over the oceans?

Our research combines elements of analytical chemistry, photochemistry, and remote sensing to study chemical species that represent relatively high chemical reactivity or large biogeochemical fluxes and exist at extremely low concentrations.

For chemical species of interest, the Zhu research group at ODU employs field observations and laboratory-based experiments to determine their concentrations as well as their production and loss through different biogeochemical pathways. We also use modeling to predict biogeochemical fluxes in natural environments.