A Note
from the IGAC Chair:
Guy Brasseur
What has the atmospheric-biospheric
chemistry community learned in the last ten years?
What are the remaining
questions to address?
IGAC was created approximately ten years
ago and currently operates under the sponsorship of two parent
organizations: the IAMAS Commission on Atmospheric Chemistry
and Global Pollution (CACGP) and the International Geosphere-
Biosphere Programme (IGBP) of ICSU. Little was known a decade
ago about the role of the biosphere in global atmospheric chemistry,
about the impact of human activities on the oxidizing capacity
of the atmosphere, about the importance of aerosols and chemically
active gases in the climate system, or about the role of multiphase
chemistry in the troposphere. During the past decade, a large
number of projects and major field campaigns have been developed
and completed with support from national and international funding
agencies. Much progress has also been made through laboratory
studies, network observations, data analysis, and modeling. Yet
today many questions remain on the agenda of the atmospheric-
biospheric chemistry community.
When a group of scientists gathered in Dookie, Australia in
1988 to identify the most pressing questions for the international
atmospheric-biospheric chemistry community to address, they greatly
influenced the design of many national programs focusing on atmospheric
chemistry and established a projectIGACthat became
an integral part of global change research. After ten years of
uninterrupted work with many successes, and perhaps a few failures,
time has come to address the following questions: What have we
really learned over the last 10 years, and what are the remaining
scientific questions? We must integrate our knowledge into a
coherent framework of results that can be understood not only
by experts, but also by decision-makers and the public.
IGAC is therefore initiating a major "integration and
synthesis" effort that, hopefully, will engage a significant
fraction of the atmosphericbiospheric chemistry community over
the next 2 years or so. The purpose is to produce and publish
a rather comprehensive report and other more specialized documents
that will present and assess progress made not only through IGAC-sponsored
research, but in the whole field. For this purpose, the contents
of the report have been outlined by a group of about 25 scientists
who met in Toulouse, France in November 1998. The chapters and
the names of the lead authors for each are shown below. To the
right is the proposed and very ambitious timetable for the preparation
of the document. I want to emphasize that this integration and
synthesis process is entirely open. Colleagues who would like
to contribute are therefore strongly encouraged to contact the
lead authors or Ms. Harriet
Barker who will coordinate production of the report. The
final draft of the document will be discussed and reviewed at
a meeting to be held in Aspen, Colorado, USA, in late April
early May, 2000. The final document will provide for the first
time a truly international response to the questions raised at
Dookie, and will benefit from several similar but somewhat limited
efforts made at the national level.
In previous issues of the IGAC newsletter, we have attempted
to present a somewhat integrated view on several issues related
to the chemistry of the atmosphere and the influence of biospheric
processes. The present issue focuses on stable isotopes and their
importance for constraining global budgets of chemical elements
in the Earth system. In this area also, much progress has been
made over the last ten years.
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