Lancaster University researchers have been recognised as key influencers in the development of atmospheric chemistry – the study of the chemical processes that affect air quality and composition.

The authors of a new opinion paper, published earlier this month, asked atmospheric chemists worldwide to nominate the scientific papers that had established the fundamental discoveries in the field or whose ideas had most influenced other researchers. The authors, Monks et al., then used this guidance to identify the papers that had most significantly influenced the discipline’s development.

Two Lancaster researchers – Professors Nick Hewitt and Oliver Wild – each had three papers featured in the study. One of these papers, on which Nick was second author, is the most highly cited in the field, with 2760 Scopus citations. All of the featured papers concern, directly or indirectly, the formation of ozone in the troposphere (lower atmosphere), which is detrimental to human health.

“Investigating chemical processes in the atmosphere is vital for understanding air pollution, and how the composition of the atmosphere contributes to climate change,” said Oliver, whose research focusses on how trace gases - both those occurring naturally and those created by humans - affect regional air quality and global climate.

The discipline of atmospheric chemistry is relatively recent, having grown from about 100 papers published worldwide in 1980 to nearly 4000 in 2020. Lancaster University researchers have been influential from the start.

“Atmospheric chemistry has been a core research and teaching theme at Lancaster University since the early days,” said Nick, whose research investigates how organic compounds produced by plants (bVOCs) react in the atmosphere with pollutant gases from human activities, and their impact on air quality and health.

“It began in 1975 with the appointment of Roy M Harrison as Lecturer in atmospheric chemistry. Roy worked on the sources and chemistry of pollutants in the lower atmosphere and began the research track that led to him becoming the Queen Elizabeth II Birmingham Centenary Professor of Environmental Health at the University of Birmingham and a Fellow of the Royal Society.”

After Roy Harrison left Lancaster in 1984, research in the discipline of atmospheric chemistry in the department not only continued but boomed with the appointment of Nick in 1985 and Oliver in 2007. They were joined in 2012 by Paul Young (now senior lecturer) whose core expertise is in atmospheric composition and climate. Paul’s recent paper in Nature showed that the Montreal Protocol has reduced greenhouse gas emissions alongside repairing the hole in the Ozone layer.

Ryan Hossaini, who arrived in 2016 as NERC Senior Research Fellow, develops state-of-the-art numerical models, run on supercomputers, to simulate the past, present and future state of the atmosphere. Kirsti Ashworth, who joined in 2016 as Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow, investigates the interactions between the land surface, the atmosphere and society.

The Lancaster Group, between them, have published more than 560 peer-reviewed research papers and attracted almost 34,000 citations.

Nick points out that the opinion paper does not reflect the quality of work done by the more recent members of the research group.

“One of the criteria used in the selection of the most influential papers was that they were published before 2010, on the grounds that for a paper to be influential in the whole field it must be at least 10 years old and have had time to gain recognition. It is inevitable therefore that only papers published by the longer-established members of the Lancaster group were selected.

“Given the strength of the Lancaster group and its recent productivity we may hope that a similar exercise carried out in a decade or two would include more Lancaster papers, cementing the role of the Lancaster Environment Centre in influencing this critical research domain.”

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