Gabriele Curci

Research

Il gusto di scoprire
per gioco le cose
- Pleasure to discover things by play

My main research interests are focused on atmospheric chemistry. The aim is to understand the processes that control the budgets of atmospheric gases that play a key role in the context of global climate change and regional air quality. The main tools adopted are: computer models of atmospheric processes that affect chemical species, and data from both in-situ and remote-sensing instruments. Among the latter, satellites have special importance because of the unique property of offering a coherent global view in time and space of the Earth System.

I am working as researcher in the Atmospheric Physics Group at CETEMPS - U. L'Aquila, Italy, led by Prof. Guido Visconti. I also had the luck of spending six months with the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard, led by Prof. Daniel J. Jacob in 2001 when still undergraduated, and one year with the Modeling Group at LISA (Paris) on a post-doc with Dr. Matthias Beekmann in 2006-2007.

Tropospheric Chemistry Global Modeling

Developing global chemistry and transport models of the troposphere is of fundamental importance in understanding the atmospheric composition, its evolution and the impact of humans on it. The chemical composition of our atmosphere plays also a key role in determining Earth's climate.

I am running and developing the GEOS-CHEM model. The research lines I am currently following:

• Evaluation and monitoring of trans-atlantic transport toward Europe
• Implementation of stratospheric chemistry: Role of Stratosphere-Troposphere Exchange (STE) in determining the oxidizing power of the atmosphere

Regional Air-Quality Modeling

Evaluation and monitoring of air quality in our cities is a very important issue for human health protection. Regional chemistry transport model are very useful tools for assessing and forecasting the chemical weather at high spatial resolution.

I am running and developing the Chimere model. The research lines I am currently following:

• Investigating the impact of biogenic/natural sources on ozone and particulate matter in Europe.
• Implementation of an high-resolution air-quality monitoring and forecast system over Italy.

Visit our experimental "chemical weather" web page here!

QUITSAT project

QUITSAT is a project funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) devoted to Air Quality assessment through the fusion of observations coming from polar and geostationary satellite sensors and ground-based data collected by DOAS spectrometry, multispectral solar radiometry, lidar techniques and chemical transport modeling.

My group at CETEMPS has several tasks in the project:

• Implementation of an high-resolution (10 km) air-quality monitoring and forecast system over North of Italy.
• Monitoring of trans-atlantic transport from North America using MOPITT CO observations and GEOS-Chem model.
• Elaborate a top-down inventory of isoprene emissions over Europe using satellite observations of formaldehyde (HCHO) column.
• Assimilation of satellite observation of nitrogen dioxide into chemistry transport models.

Weather Station & Meteo

Weather station run by CETEMPS at University of L'Aquila. Complete weather data on-line and lots of picture of our wonderful city and its surroundings! Click here to go!

Large Impact Events

How asteroids and meteorites affect the chemistry of the atmosphere colliding with the Earth?

Please visit our dedicated web page here!

Chaos in natural phenomena

Many natural phenomena display an irregular behaviour. Chaos theories gave us the chance to reduce some of them to low-dimensional deterministic systems. But how can we say whether if the system behind what we observe is chaotic or not?

Special techniques must be developed to discern deterministic chaos from simple stochasticity in experimental time series. An introductory account of two of these techniques are given in this presentation (ppt, 800 kb).