Heavily polluted Tijuana River drives regional air quality crisis Industrial chemicals and untreated sewage have polluted the Tijuana River for decades, recently causing >1300 consecutive days of California beach closures. In summer 2024, wastewater flows surged to ...

Water pollution doesn't necessarily stay in the water, and downwind communities suffer. Proud to have been a part of this study led by Ben Rico and the Prather team at UCSD, and hoping for some effective action to clean things up soon.

@kprather.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Project 2025 plan calls for demolition of NOAA and National Weather Service The call to dismantle the United States' vital weather department has raised the hackles of experts who say NOAA provides not only important free data but also life-saving information.

We collectively haven’t been taking the plans laid out by Project 2025 seriously enough. They want to destroy NOAA so people won’t know that climate change is happening. It sounds stupid and alarmist if you haven’t been paying attention.

More work is needed to explore this effect and understand the human health connections so that we can better protect and empower vulnerable downwind communities.

Of particular interest is that we find that the spatial extent of blooms at the Salton Sea (as detected by satellite instruments) appears to be a strong predictor of impacts on downwind respiratory hospitalizations, suggesting the importance of a lake spray aerosol source directly from the water.

Using a combination of observations and modeling, we provide further evidence that particulates originating from around the shrinking Salton Sea may be disproportionately harmful in terms of their health impacts on communities downwind. Not all windblown dust particles are the same!

This study was led by Dr. Yaning Miao as part of her PhD research in my group, with support from our amazing collaborators and coauthors.

Source-specific acute cardio-respiratory effects of ambient coarse particulate matter exposure in California's Salton Sea region - IOPscienceSearch Source-specific acute cardio-respiratory effects of ambient coarse particulate matter exposure in California’s Salton Sea region, Miao, Yaning, Porter, William C, Benmarhnia, Tarik, Lowe, Catherine, Lyons, Timothy W, Hung, Caroline, Diamond, Charles

I'm excited to announce that our study on health impacts of particulates around the shrinking Salton Sea is now published in Environmental Research: Health!
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Image of John Seinfeld and information about this call for papers (promotional image)

ACS ES&T Air is accepting submissions for a special issue dedicated to the work of John H. Seinfeld, featuring contributions from many fields including air quality, aerosol microphysics and climate, and organic aerosol formation and dynamics. Closing date is 3/3/25. Please repost!! go.acs.org/bC7

Can we achieve atmospheric chemical environments in the laboratory? An integrated model-measurement approach to chamber SOA studies Multiscale modeling provides a framework for simulating atmospheric peroxy radical chemistry in laboratory experiments.

How does SOA formation in labs relate to the real atmosphere? I learned alot through this collaboration with @jessekroll.bsky.social, led by amazing postdoc Hannah Kenagy
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...