It combines knowledge of chemistry, engineering, meteorology, biology, geography, and human behavior. It is a cooperative research field, where investigators with different areas of expertise pool their talents and resources. It is a young field, where much remains unknown or unsolved. It includes field studies from city centers to interstate highways to remote forests and tundra to distant oceans. It includes laboratory experiments and computer modeling. It includes instrument development, lugging equipment, air conditioned comfort, and swarms of mosquitos, sweating and freezing. In other words, something for everyone.
Dr. Young is interested in organic compounds in the troposphere. Many of these are anthropogenic (human generated), products of partial combustion of fuels and evaporation of fuels and solvents. Others are biogenic (naturally generated), products of living plants and animals. Each organic compound has a characteristic rate and pathway of reaction with other species in the troposphere. Organics emitted in one place are transported by wind and weather, reacting along the way. These organics may be toxic themselves, may participate in chain reactions with nitrogen oxides to form tropospheric ozone (smog), and may condense to form suspended particulates. (Particulates formed by naturally-emitted compounds produce the haze in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Great Smokey Mountains.) Dr. Young is interested in developing new techniques to sample and analyze the organic trace gases in the atmosphere, in investigating the sources and sinks of the organics measured, and in determining the organics and the sources to be targeted by efforts to reduce tropospheric ozone pollution
(Last modified on 06/23/00)