Abstract
In the past, environmental change studies have typically focused on individual processes and impacts, without substantial interaction between the scientific communities pursuing them. Air pollution had typically been examined separately from climate change, the stratosphere separately from the troposphere, and local issues were studied separately from global ones. Similarly, policy-making addressing such challenges has also been designed individually. Nowadays, increased computational power has allowed scientists to use models that simulate the different components of the Earth system simultaneously. Such advances have facilitated the study of complex and obscure physical interactions, and are key in the process of breaking boundaries between traditional environmental science disciplines. In this talk, examples of recent scientific efforts towards this direction will be presented. Furthermore, there will be a focus on two of my recent studies in which issues such as ozone depletion, air pollution, temperature and precipitation changes, from global to regional scales, are investigated simultaneously.
Biography
Apostolos Voulgarakis is a Lecturer in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. He is a member of the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group, and an expert in composition-climate interactions. His studies investigate how climate changes influence the evolution of important gases and aerosols in the atmosphere, and, in turn, how these constituents influence global and regional climate, on interannual to multidecadal timescales. Apostolos studied physics and environmental engineering in Greece, and then pursued a PhD in atmospheric chemistry at the University of Cambridge. Before moving to Imperial College, he spent several years as a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University in New York. He is a contributing author for the IPCC 5th Assessment Report (AR5), and leads part of the analysis conducted for the Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Modeling Intercomparison Project (ACCMIP).