Publications by authors named "B M Place"
Article Synopsis
- Wildfires are a growing contributor to air pollution, particularly due to reactive organic compounds (ROC), which have varying health impacts based on their toxicity and abundance.
- A study combining field campaign data and air quality modeling found that current emissions estimates capture only 40-45% of the total ROC released from wildfires.
- The research indicates that particulate ROC could significantly affect health risks from smoke exposure, highlighting the need for more accurate toxicity data on these compounds.
Article Synopsis
- The decline in vehicle emissions highlights the increasing role of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from Volatile Chemical Products (VCP), but their complex chemistry poses challenges for accurate modeling.
- Researchers developed a new chemical mechanism called RACM2B-VCP to better represent VOC emissions from VCP sources, specifically in urban settings like Los Angeles.
- Model evaluations show promising results, indicating that over 50% of anthropogenic VOC reactivity and ozone enhancement in the area is linked to VCP emissions, despite some remaining discrepancies in the model's overall VOC reactivity predictions.
Nontargeted analysis (NTA) is a rapidly growing field of techniques that includes the identification of unknown chemical analytes in complex mixtures such as environmental, biological, and food matrices. The use of reference mass spectral databases is a key component of most NTA workflows, providing a high level of confidence for chemical identification when analytical standards are not available, yet effective interlaboratory sharing of research grade spectra remains challenging. The Database Infrastructure for Mass Spectrometry (DIMSpec) project focused on the creation of an open-source toolkit supporting storage and sharing of high-resolution mass spectra with attached sample and methodological metadata.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWith increasing public awareness of PFAS, and their presence in biological and environmental media across the globe, comes a matching increase in the number of PFAS monitoring studies. As more matrices and sample cohorts are examined, there are more opportunities for matrix interferents to appear as PFAS where there are none (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFState inventories indicate that dairy operations account for nearly half of California's methane budget. Recent analyses suggest, however, that these emissions may be underestimated, complicating efforts to develop emission reduction strategies. Here, we report estimates of dairy methane emissions in the southern San Joaquin Valley (SJV) of California in June 2021 using airborne flux measurements.
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