Welcome to the SATCHMO Group

SATCHMO: Synergetic Atmospheric Transport and CHemistry MOdellers

Our group studies atmospheric chemistry, tracer transport and chemistry-climate interactions using a wide range of different numerical models, from "box" models which represent the chemical processes occurring at a specific location, through cloud ensemble models, which resolve the processes occurring on the scale of storms over a limited area, up to global models, with horizontal grid dimensions of about one to a few hundred kilometers per side.

Click on the links to the left to learn more about our members and our research.
About the name “SATCHMO”: music fans will recognize this as the nickname of the great Louis Armstrong.  For us, the “Atmospheric Transport and Chemistry Modellers” part is pretty evident.  But what about the “Synergetic” part?  Synergetic has become quite a buzzword since being popularized by usage such as in Buckminster Fuller’s book “Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking”, but that has resulted in it being defined in many different ways, and its meaning often being mistaken.

Synergy, as meant here, simply means that the combined behavior of a system is more than can be predicted by the sum of its individual parts.  This applies very well to scientific issues we focus on, which include many tightly coupled interactions between various aspects such as emissions, deposition processes, chemical reactions, aerosol formation, radiative transfer, cloud processes and atmospheric dynamics.   The chemical weather forecasts which we routinely perform highlight this aspect of interconnectedness and the need for a complex model in order to predict the behaviour of the atmospheric chemical system.  It also highlights the difficulties which arise due to the lack of understanding of various components and their interactions, seen for instance when there are discrepancies between model predictions and observations. 

The term synergy is also meant to apply specifically to our research group, which consists of scientists with a very heterogeneous set of research interests and degrees of experience (you can click on the other links to learn more about these).  Bringing such a group of researchers together and encouraging communication on various tangentially related topics, from the perspectives of both experienced and newer scientists, is an enjoyable part of scientific research which often helps us to make significant advances in our scientific understanding.