Publications by authors named "J Michael Wentzell"

Article Synopsis
  • Dry deposition plays a significant role in removing reactive organic carbon from the atmosphere, impacting airborne chemical reactions and transferring this carbon to other environmental systems.
  • Using aircraft measurements, researchers found that oil operations can lead to high deposition rates of organic carbon, reaching up to 100 tons per hour, with rapid lifetimes of about 4 hours that can compete with oxidation processes.
  • Traditional models for gas-phase deposition may not capture all deposited organic carbon, indicating a need to consider these deposition processes in assessing the effects on freshwater ecosystems, as they contribute significantly to the overall carbon balance compared to terrestrial sources.
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Patient access to new oncology drugs in Canada is only possible after navigating multiple sequential systemic checkpoints for national regulatory approval, health technology assessment (HTA) and collective government price negotiation. These steps delay access and prevent health care providers from being able to prescribe optimal therapy. Eighteen Canadian oncology clinicians from the medicine, nursing and pharmacy professions met to develop consensus recommendations for defining reasonable government performance standards around process and timeliness to improve Canadian cancer patients' access to best care.

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Anthropogenic organic carbon emissions reporting has been largely limited to subsets of chemically speciated volatile organic compounds. However, new aircraft-based measurements revealed total gas-phase organic carbon emissions that exceed oil sands industry-reported values by 1900% to over 6300%, the bulk of which was due to unaccounted-for intermediate-volatility and semivolatile organic compounds. Measured facility-wide emissions represented approximately 1% of extracted petroleum, resulting in total organic carbon emissions equivalent to that from all other sources across Canada combined.

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Monochloramine, dichloramine and trichloramine (NHCl, NHCl, NCl) are measured in the ambient atmosphere, in downtown Toronto in summer (median 39, 15 and 2.8 ppt) and winter (median 11, 7.3 and 0.

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Forest fire research over the last several decades has improved the understanding of fire emissions and impacts. Nevertheless, the evolution of forest fire plumes remains poorly quantified and understood. Here, a Lagrangian chemical transport model, the Forward Atmospheric Stochastic Transport model coupled with the Master Chemical Mechanism (FAST-MCM), has been developed to simulate the transport and chemical transformations of plumes from a boreal forest fire over several hours since their emission.

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