UPS welcomes Pieter van Zyl and Kerneels Jaars

Pr Pieter van Zyl and Dr Kerneels Jaars, atmospheric chemists from the North-West University (NWU), South Africa, recently spent one month on secondment at the Aerology Laboratory (LAERO), CNRS/Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier (UPS) mixed research unit, France, as part of the INSA project.

Pieter and Kerneels co-lead the Atmospheric Chemistry Research Group (ACRG) at NWU, which focuses on ground-based in-situ atmospheric measurements on South African long-term monitoring sites.

Pieter is in charge of the long-term atmospheric deposition monitoring sites in South Africa, including the International Network to study Deposition and Atmospheric chemistry in AFrica (INDAAF) supersite of Welgegund. Kerneels serves on the Integrated Land Ecosystem-Atmosphere Processes Study (iLEAPS) Early Career Network, and is the co-chair of Africa for the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) project Southern Hemisphere Working Group.

Pieter and Kerneels were in Toulouse to collaborate with Dr Corinne Galy-Lacaux (LAERO, CNRS) on wet and dry deposition of nitrogen species, and Dr Cathy Liousse (LAERO, CNRS) on health impacts associated with aerosols collected in the deposition network in South Africa. They focused on compiling meta-data files for atmospheric gaseous species, aerosols and precipitation measurements conducted in the South African deposition network. These data files will be uploaded on the INDAAF database and in the European EBAS database, which will be publicly available to the scientific community. Pieter worked more specifically on the Elemental Carbon/Organic Carbon (EC/OC) aerosol database to provide data to the future EC/OC World Meteorological Organization assessment led by the European Joint Research Centre. Pieter and Kerneels also assisted with atmospheric back trajectory analysis to determine the source of atmospheric compounds, with a focus on atmospheric nitrogen species.