Dr. Barry Lefer
A little over a year ago, my wife and I moved from Colorado to Houston. Here I am a professor at the University of Houston (UH) and teach classes in Climate Change and Atmospheric Chemistry. This was a big (and exciting) change for us. While we still miss a few things in Colorado (good friends, big mountains, and moderate climate), Houston is starting to feel like home. We are learning our way around the 4th largest city in the US and starting to make some friends. While we are still adjusting to the warmer weather, our cat, Jean-Luc, seems to love it here where he has lots of bugs to chase.
My first job as an atmospheric scientist was washing rain collection buckets when I was a student at the University of Virginia. Orignially I thought I wanted to be a sports medicine physician, but after a year or so of pre-med classes, I realized that I was much more interested in learning more about what was going on outside the laboratory window. An introductory class about Acid Rain is what got me hooked on Atmospheric Chemistry. In graduate school at the University of New Hampshire I was fortunate to get the opportunity to travel all over the world sampling trace gases and particles. But what I really learned is that collecting data may be a lot of work (as well as a lot of fun) this is really only half of the job. The other half is to write up our results, which is even more difficult, but much more rewarding. As a postdoc I went to NCAR to study radiation from the Sun and ozone photochemistry by making UV measurements (again from many different places). I also learned how important atmospheric models are to our understanding of how the Earth works. Now I collaborate with many different modeles to help me interpret my data and even learning how to run a few models myself.
I will be working at the T1 site (from 22 Feb to 02 April) during the MIRAGE-Mex/MILAGRO field campaign. I will try to post regular reports from the field to tell you what I am up to. Please feel free to stop by to see what we are up to or email me with any questions.
Sincerely,
Barry Lefer
blefer@uh.edu
