Turpin, Surratt awarded NOAA grant to study exposures to fires, their impact on atmosphere, climate and health

June 22, 2016

Dr. Barbara Turpin, headshot

Dr. Barbara Turpin

Dr. Jason Surratt

Dr. Jason Surratt

Barbara J. Turpin, PhD, professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, will serve as principal investigator for a three-year, $592,448 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Turpin will work with Jason Surratt, PhD, associate professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the Gillings School, who will serve as a co-principal investigator for the project.

The grant, “Characterizing Oxidized North American Fire Emissions and Their Aqueous/Multiphase Atmospheric Transformations Through the FIREX Campaign,” will support a study of the impact of biomass burning on air quality and climate change.

FIREX – an acronym for “Fire Influence on Regional and Global Environments Experiment” – is an effort that aims to understand and predict the impact of fires in North America on the atmosphere and to support better land management to prevent those fires from occurring.

“Although NOAA’s interest in this work hinges around climate, exposure to atmospherically-processed wildfire emissions is a major (and growing) concern in the western U.S.,” Turpin said. “Exposures are comparable to air pollution exposures in China. The proposed work is aimed at better understanding the properties of these mixtures and the atmospheric processes that transform wildfire emissions to improve models that predict air pollution, human health and climate impacts from wildfire emissions.”


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Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: David Pesci, director of communications, (919) 962-2600 or dpesci@unc.edu

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