2020 News & Events

Owen Cooper, Audrey Gaudel and Kai-Lan Chang receive CIRES Outstanding Performance Awards

16 April 2020

Chemical Sciences Laboratory scientists Dr. Owen Cooper, Dr. Audrey Gaudel and Dr. Kai-Lan Chang receive CIRES Outstanding Performance Awards in the Science and Engineering category for their outstanding leadership of the Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report. The recognition also includes their colleague, Dr. Irina Petropavlovskikh, based at the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory. This award recognizes Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) employees who have uncommon initiative, resourcefulness, and/or scientific creativity conducting research with potential to expand or change the direction of a particular field or discipline. It also recognizes participation in collaborative and/or multidisciplinary research that engages a broader cross-section than the researcher's typical scientific or engineering community.

award recipients
(Pictured left to right) Owen Cooper, Audrey Gaudel, Kai-Lan Chang and Irina Petropavlovskikh with their CIRES Outstanding Performance Awards, July 2020.

The Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report (TOAR) is an official Activity of the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Project (IGAC). TOAR's mission is to provide the research community with an up-to-date scientific assessment of tropospheric ozone's global distribution and trends from the surface to the tropopause. The first phase of TOAR spanned 2014-2019 and the activity fulfilled its goals of, 1) producing the first tropospheric ozone assessment report based on all available surface observations, the peer-reviewed literature and new analyses; and 2) building the world's largest database of surface ozone metrics, freely accessible for research on the global-scale impact of ozone on climate, human health and crop/ecosystem productivity.

CIRES Senior Research Scientist, Owen Cooper, proposed the idea of TOAR to the IGAC Scientific Steering Committee in 2014 and served as the Activity's chairperson for the duration of the project. Audrey Gaudel led the writing of TOAR-Climate, one of the core peer-reviewed publications of the assessment report. Kai-Lan Chang published a key statistical analysis that quantified ozone trends across North America, Europe and East Asia using all available surface monitoring sites. Irina Petropavlovskikh provided data and analysis in support of several of the TOAR publications. Their contributions to TOAR were magnified by the participation of over 230 scientists and air quality experts from 36 nations, representing research on all seven continents. Owen, Audrey, Kai-Lan and Irina receive their well-deserved awards at the CIRES Rendezvous on 14 August 2020 at the University of Colorado Boulder.

TOAR workshop group
Participants of the second international TOAR workshop, January 2016, Beijing

Further details on the achievements of TOAR can be found on the IGAC Activities - Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report, Phase I webpage, with links to the peer-reviewed publications comprising the report, and the TOAR Surface Ozone Database.