Cohen, Ronald
Submitted by cmjones on March 16, 2007 - 1:48pm.
Name of Person:
Ronald Cohen
Picture:
Department:
Earth and Planetary Science, Associate Professor
Research Interests:
Atmospheric Chemistry -- A detailed mechanistic understanding of the potential for human activity to cause global change is being developed. Experiments in Professor Cohen's group address the connection between molecular reactions and regional or global scale atmospheric phenomena.
Achievements:
Professor Cohen's group addresses the connection between molecular reactions and regional or global scale atmospheric phenomena: What chemical reactions control whether ozone is locally produced or consumed in the urban and remote troposphere? How do these regional processes affect the oxidative capacity of the atmosphere on a global scale? What are the primary reactions controlling the rate of photochemical removal of ozone in the stratosphere? What are the natural and human induced variations in the concentrations of the free radicals that are rate limiting in these reactions? What is the molecular event during evaporation of water? These questions guide an interdisciplinary chemical/geophysical approach to exploring the structure and dynamics of the earth-ocean-atmosphere system. Cohen’s work emphasizes development of new technologies to obtain detailed observations of atmospheric composition and to validate and interpret large-scale records obtained from space-borne instruments.