Allison Ronan and Kaitlyn Confer both defended their theses in April and graduated this semester.
Allison’s masters thesis, titled “Have improvements in ozone air quality benefited plants?” used our SynFlux dataset to explore trends in plant injuries from ozone. She showed that falling ozone concentration has not translated into reduced impacts on plants. The reason is that leaf stomata control the ozone uptake and injury as much as the ozone concentration. Her work is now in review at Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene.
Kaitlyn’s honors in the major thesis tests the ability of the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model to simulate surface ozone depletion events in Arctic springtime. She tested multiple versions of the model against observations from the O-Buoy observing network and land surface stations. Kaitlyn presented the research at the 9th International GEOS-Chem Conference in May and she is headed to the University of Washington for graduate school in the fall.
Congratulations Allison and Kaitlyn!