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Susan Solomon is a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration's Aeronomy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.
She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of
the French and European Academies of Sciences, a fellow of the American
Meteorological Society and American Geophysical Union and has received
numerous awards and honors, including the National Medal of Science.
(Photo by Carlye Calvin, courtesy NOAA)
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As a young student of chemistry in the late 1970s, I became intrigued
with the notion that chemistry could be explored on a planet instead of
in a test tube. UCAR and NCAR played a key role in realizing that dream.
In 1977 I received a UCAR student fellowship, which led me to work at
NCAR that summer (before I began graduate school in chemistry at the
University of California, Berkeley). I was firmly hooked on atmospheric
science as a career after a few months studying under the inspired
tutelage of Paul Crutzen (then director of NCAR's Atmospheric Chemistry
Division, or ACD), Jack Fishman (then a postdoc with Crutzen), and Ray
Roble (NCAR senior scientist, now at the High Altitude Observatory). I
returned to NCAR to do my dissertation under the NCAR graduate assistant
program during 1979–81. I am one of many former students whose
opportunities to interact with UCAR and NCAR provided excitement,
stimulation, and truly unique educational opportunities.
While at NCAR, I began working with Rolando Garcia to develop a coupled,
two-dimensional chemical-dynamical model of the stratosphere and
mesosphere. It was really Rolando's innovative insights about dynamics
that led our model to be a little ahead of its time. He implemented a
residual Eulerian approach that quickly led us to a better physical
understanding of how transport moves trace chemicals such as
stratospheric methane and ozone around. When the ozone hole was
discovered in 1985, we were fortunate in having such a good model to
examine possible explanations for its mysterious occurrence. We fingered
heterogenous chemistry (in particular, the reaction of hydrochloric acid
with chlorine nitrate) as the likely cause. This turned out to be a good
guess.
We've subsequently combined our dynamical and chemical knowledge to look
at the effects of volcanic eruptions on ozone depletion, at gravity
waves and mesospheric species, and at a number of other intriguing
chemical-dynamical problems. Without the collaborative spirit and
special expertise of ACD and NCAR as a whole, none of this could have
happened.
In the mid-1980s, I was also privileged to begin to interact with Jeff
Kiehl of the Climate and Global Dynamics Division. Jeff has been the
father of radiative transfer codes, generously giving away to many
dozens of researchers worldwide. Besides working with Jeff in putting a
better treatment of radiation into our two-dimensional stratospheric
model, I've been one of many researchers now benefiting from his and
others' work on the three-dimensional Community Climate System Model. As
they did with the Community Climate Model, research and support
personnel at NCAR are playing a critical role in making this state-of-
the-art coupled climate model available to others. Only at NCAR could
such diverse talents be brought together (including strong university
involvement) to produce such a powerful tool and to provide its
considerable horsepower to a broad community.
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