Atmospheric Chemistry
Assistant Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
Office: Burnside Hall 815
Tel.: (514) 398-5450
Fax.: (514) 398-6115
Website
michel.bourqui [at] mcgill.ca (E-mail)
Academic background
- B.Sc. (EPF Lausanne, Switzerland, 1997)
- Ph.D. (ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2001)
- Postdoctoral Fellow (University of Reading, UK, 2001-2002)
- Postdoctoral Fellow (ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2003-2004
Research interests
Our main areas of investigation are:
- The dynamics, chemistry, and climate of the stratosphere, with the ozone layer as centerpiece.
- The tropopause dynamics and chemistry
- The development of numerical models and data assimilation schemes with focus on the stratosphere.
The stratosphere is an atmospheric region where dynamics and chemistry interact together:
- The dynamics drives the transport of chemical constituents and thereby drives the chemistry
- The chemistry produces distributions of chemical constituents that affect radiation and thus dynamics
The result of this interaction depends on the relative time-scales of dynamics, radiation and chemistry, which indeed vary largely throughout the stratosphere. This interaction processes are responsible for the observed distributions of stratospheric ozone and the well-known ozone hole, and more generally are key to our understanding of the stratosphere. Furthermore based on this understanding, our capability to predict stratospheric ozone over the next century has received increasing importance due to the implications of anthropogenic emissions on stratospheric ozone.
Our research is based on numerical models and tools we develop and/or apply (such that three-dimensional climate-chemistry models, high-resolution mesoscale models, highly-idealised numerical models tuned to study specific processes, trajectory models, photochemistry models,...), and on various data sets (satellites, measurement campaigns, operational analyses,...).
Current projects
- Lagrangian dynamics of the PV-defined tropopause: Stratosphere-troposphere exchange, transport residence time, effects on idealised and comprehensive chemistry.
- Data assimilation in the stratosphere: The ensemble Kalman filter approach and the representation of dynamical and chemical constraints.
- Interactions between mixing and chemistry.
- Ozone layer: Predicting its future evolution, and understanding its changes due to climate change.
- Development of a fast chemistry scheme based on innovative numerical methods.
Some recent publications
Taylor C. P. and M. S. Bourqui, 2004. A new fast stratospheric ozone chemistry scheme in an intermediate general circulation model. Part I: Description and evaluation. Submitted to Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc. (available on request).
Bourqui, M. S., C. P. Taylor and K. P. Shine, 2004. A new fast stratospheric ozone chemistry scheme in an intermediate general circulation model. Part II: Application to effects of future increases in greenhouse gases. Submitted to Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc. (available on request).
Bourqui M. S., 2004. Stratosphere-troposphere exchange from the Lagrangian perspective: A case study and method sensitivities. Submitted to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (available on request).
Shine K. P., M. S. Bourqui, P. M. De F. Forster, S. H. E. Hare, U. Langematz, P. Braesicke, V. Grewe, M. Ponater, C. Schnadt, C. A. Smith, J. D. Haigh, J. Austin, N. Butchart, D. T. Shindell, W. J. Randel, T. Nagashima, R. W. Portmann, S. Solomon, D. J. Seidel, J. Lanzante, S. Klein, V. Ramaswamy and M. D. Schwarzkopf, 2003.A comparison of model-simulated trends in stratospheric temperatures. Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc. 129, pp 1565-1588.
Stohl A., H. Wernli, M. Bourqui, C. Forster, P. James, M. Liniger, P. Seibert, M. Sprenger, 2003. A new perspective of stratosphere-troposphere exchange. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 84, pp 1565-1675. Wernli, H. and M. Bourqui, 2002: A Lagrangian "1-year climatology" of (deep) cross-tropopause exchange in the extratropical northern hemisphere. J. Geophys. Res., 107(D2), 10.1029/2001JD000812.
Bourqui, M., 2001: Analysis and Quantification of STE: A Novel Approach. Dissertation No. 13322, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zuerich, GCA Verlag, Herdecke 2001, ISBN 3-89863-055-2.
Sprenger, M., H. Wernli and M. Bourqui, 2001: A 15-year climatology of stratosphere-troposphere exchange and its link to potential vorticity streamers and cutoffs. Pp. 245-249 in Proc. of the 13th conference on atmospheric and oceanic fluid dynamics, AMS, Breckenridge CO.