Emissions in transition: Exploring air quality-climate links from cities to forests

Thousands of volatile organic compounds are released into the atmosphere from both human activities and natural sources. These emissions fuel complex chemical reactions that influence air quality and climate. As societies transition to cleaner energy, as temperatures rise and ecosystems respond to climate stress, the composition and amount of these emissions are shifting. Understanding these changes is crucial to predict future air quality and climate, since emissions are the basic input of any atmospheric chemical transport model. However, measuring concentrations of volatile organic compounds is often not enough to understand emissions, as the rapid chemical transformations of these reactive compounds in the atmosphere make it hard to assess their source strength and source location.

Direct airborne emission observations are a powerful tool to address this. With such airborne flux observations, it is possible to map real-world emissions of volatile organic compounds at a landscape scale of few km².  This lecture will show how airborne flux observations helped us find that changes in urban emission composition were not reflected in current emission inventories and revealed links of anthropogenic emissions with temperature. It will also highlight our current research on how climate change-driven stress can change biogenic emissions and their impact on the atmosphere.