Eric Ray - University of Colorado and NOAA

Determining stratospheric transport from trace gas measurements has a long history, dating back to Brewer over 75 years ago.  The broad features of the stratospheric transport have been known since then and have been refined over the years in numerous ways. But we have been limited in making a detailed quantitative description of the Brewer-Dobson circulation climatology and trends due to a lack of sufficiently precise and consistently measured trace gases in the stratosphere.  In this talk I’ll give an overview of some of my research journey using primarily in situ trace gas measurements to quantify various aspects of stratospheric transport, in particular the mean age of air.  I’ll briefly describe my recent work on stratospheric mean age trends, the value of simultaneously measuring multiple trace gases and conclude with some thoughts on what realistic measurements would be most useful for this topic moving forward.

Eric Ray is a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado and works at the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory.  Dr. Ray has spent his entire career at CIRES and NOAA since obtaining his PhD in 1997 from the University of Washington.