Student Research Spotlight: Physics

Join us for a new topic on the first Thursday of every month!

Come learn about faculty and student research in the physics department! Every month a different set of faculty and students will talk about what they do. Topics will include water and climate, radioastronomy, interstellar gas, planetary atmospheres, star formation, remote sensing, and lightning and atmospheric electricity. RSVP below!

May's Featured Talk:
Winds, Weather, and Ozone!

Speakers:
Ken Minschwaner, NMT Wilkening Professor of Physics

Gloria Manney, Senior Research Scientist at NorthWest Research Associates and NMT Physics Adjunct Professor

Zachary Lawrence, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences/NOAA and former NMT student

Jessica George, NMT Physics undergraduate student

Our atmosphere contains mostly nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), along with a number of highly variable trace gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ozone. Although these trace gases make up just a small fraction of the typical composition of air, they can exert a disproportionate influence on the energy balance of the earth-atmosphere system. One common theme for our research in atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric dynamics, and climate, has been ozone - how it is formed and destroyed by chemical reactions, how it interacts with other trace molecules, and how it can be transported throughout the atmosphere by winds and weather. Studies of ozone, in turn, are leading us to new discoveries involving phenomena such as tropical cyclones, the polar vortex, the jet streams, and large-scale coupling between different layers of Earth’s atmosphere.

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