Columbia Climate School's Office of Faculty Affairs is pleased to announce that Dan Westervelt will deliver our next research seminar, “Multi-scale Approaches to Understanding Aerosol-driven Air Pollution and Climate Change: From Sensors to Supercomputers,” on Wednesday, March 11, from 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM in the Hogan Hall A-level Conference Room, at 2910 Broadway.
If joining on Zoom, RSVP here. You will receive the Zoom link the day before the event. If you cannot access this link, please email [email protected] to be added to the Zoom list. Light refreshments will be served.
Abstract: Atmospheric aerosols result in millions of premature deaths around the world and drive regionally heterogenous climate change. This seminar presents a comprehensive multi-scale research program examining aerosol impacts on climate and air quality, bridging the gap between global modeling and local observations. The work addresses two critical interconnected challenges, as sparse pollutant monitoring strategies especially in resource-limited areas makes modeling efforts uncertain and also hinders the development of mitigation policies and regulations. Using a multimodel hierarchy of coupled climate model simulations, I show that future regionally-specific aerosol emissions changes are responsible for a variety of climate impacts, including warming the Arctic up to 1 ºC and disrupting precipitation patterns in Africa. Complementing these global modeling efforts, I simultaneously deploy a variety of novel modeling and measurement techniques in resource-constrained environments (e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa), using remote sensing, small air sensors, and research-grade instrumentation to make some of the first detailed aerosol mass and composition measurements in each location. Leveraging these techniques allows us to glean information that can feedback to global models, for instance source-specific emissions information. Our combined measurement-modeling approach shows that PM2.5-driven mortality could reach 1.3 million deaths in Africa by 2050. I conclude with several new directions for the research program, including aerosol measurements in sparsely monitored disadvantaged communities within New York City.
Bio: Dr. Daniel M. Westervelt is an Associate Research Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) of Columbia University in the City of New York. Dr. Westervelt is also an affiliate faculty member of the Columbia University Data Science Institute, an affiliated scientist with NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and an air pollution advisor to the US State Department. He is also a Columbia University Climate and Life Fellow. He was awarded the 2024-2025 Faculty Mentorship Award for Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. His current research spans climate change and atmospheric chemistry and physics using models, advanced in-situ instrumentation, and remote sensing, with an emphasis on applications in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). Prior to his faculty position at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, he worked as an Associate Research Scientist at LDEO, and as a Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He completed his PhD degree in May 2013 in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
