luciana rizzo
Luciana Rizzo working on a field experiment in Michigan (July 2007).
As an ASP/IAI post doc working at ACD (Atmospheric Chemistry Division) and TIIMES (The Institute for Integrative & Multidisciplinary Earth Studies), Luciana Rizzo focuses her research on biogenic aerosols. Aerosol particles influence climate as they interact with solar radiation, and may also affect cloud properties and photochemical reaction constants at the troposphere. Understanding those effects requires detailed information about aerosol sources and sinks. By means of field campaigns and laboratory experiments, Luciana has been studying aerosol processes such as emission, deposition, growth and new particle formation in natural environments.
Working with collaborators in ACD, she has developed a new smog chamber facility for research on new particle formation from the oxidation of biogenic volatile organic compounds (VOC). Her specific interest on those chamber studies is to reproduce some of the conditions seen in the Amazon forest: high VOC emissions from the vegetation, elevated relative humidity, and low nitrogen and sulfur oxides concentrations. Unlike some temperate forests in the world, new particle formation events are not clearly observed in undisturbed areas in the Amazon. Chamber studies may help to understand the limiting factors and threshold concentrations for aerosol nucleation in tropical forests.
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation and by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research.