This scientific foray was business as usual for members of the Rowland-Blake Group, named after UCI professors F. Sherwood Rowland,a Nobel Prize-winningscientist, and Donald R. Blake, chairman of the chemistry department.
Rowland died over the weekend in his Corona del Mar home at age 84.
The group has been isolating and quantifying various gases to measure their impact on the environment since 1976, but the range of projects has expanded and the research has become more rigorous, Blake said.
About 20 people are in the group, ranging from grad students to technicians to Ph.D.s.
"Our group is one of the few in the world that takes measurements that are then used by the modeling community to estimate future climate change," Blake said. "There are not many groups like us in the U.S."
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Scope of projects
The group's research is based on air sample canisters from around the world. Some of these canisters are placed on airplane wings, some on boats.
One area of recent, significant research is methane, the topic of Blake's thesis and a greenhouse gas that can cause urban smog.
"I never thought when we started running samples in 1979 that it would be as important as it is now," he said.
Members of the group, including Blake, will be flying on two NASA projects later this year: one based in Kansas and one in Thailand. Data obtained from the Kansas project — which includes atmospheric observations in Colorado, Oklahoma and Alabama — will provide insight into the upper troposphere, where ozone is active as a greenhouse gas.
The purpose of the Thailand project is to examine the effect of emissions in Asia on clouds, climate and air quality.
The group has been studying the air in China as well.
"Everyone is downwind of someone there," Blake said.
