MISSOULA – Lixu Jin, a recent graduate of the Ph.D. chemistry program at the 猎奇重口, finished his academic journey smoking hot by publishing an article in Science Advances, one of the top research journals in his field.
The article offers new insights into how wildfire smoke plumes change over time to affect air quality and ultimately human health. Dr. Jin and his collaborators identified knowledge gaps used by scientists to model the harmful components in smoke and outlined steps needed to improve those models.
“When I see news about wildfires, I immediately think about what that smoke means for the air people are breathing – not just near the fire but in communities downwind,” Jin said. “That makes the science feel very real and urgent. And it excites me to use chemistry and measurements to better understand what’s in smoke, how it changes and how it affects air quality and health.”
Biomass burning influences global air quality and climate. Ozone, a key air toxin and greenhouse gas, is closely connected to the chemistry of other air pollutants and to the formation of secondary aerosols.
Jin said accurately representing ozone in air quality models has long been a challenge. Recent aircraft observations have offered new, highly constrained insights into how emissions from biomass burning evolve chemically at the plume scale, creating an important opportunity to bring this detailed understanding into larger-scale models.
As part of the research, Jin and his team studied data collected from five wildfire plumes sampled during three aircraft campaigns. The planes flew through plumes several times and sampled the smoke as it changed. The research focused on the first five hours of the chemical evolution of the smoke. The study area included five U.S. states with various fuel types and plume sizes.
Atmospheric chemists use chemical mechanisms within models to understand ozone, hydroxyl radicals and other reactive substances that play a central role in the chemistry of biomass burning plumes. Jin and his research partners believe their work to reveal gaps in the models is an important step toward clarifying the role of biomass burning in the Earth’s climate system.
“These findings are poised to meaningfully influence both the atmospheric chemistry and Earth-system modeling research communities,” said Lu Hu, a UM chemistry and biochemistry researcher who served as one of Jin’s mentors.
Jin first came to UM in 2019 after earning a bachelor’s degree with honors in meteorology/atmospheric sciences from Lanzhou University in China. After moving to Missoula, where wildfire smoke is not an abstract concept but something people experience firsthand, he was drawn to the challenge of understanding how smoke changes after it leaves the fire and starts reacting in sunlight.
At UM, Jin joined the atmospheric chemistry research group led by Hu, collaborating with renowned smoke researcher Robert Yokelson and a broader multi-institution team. Jin’s doctoral training emphasized linking real-world observations to models, translating detailed plume-scale chemistry learned from aircraft measurements into tools used for regional-to-global air-quality and public health assessment.
“Honestly, UM first got my attention because of 猎奇重口’s image in pop culture – ‘A River Runs Through It’ and later the series ‘Yellowstone,’” Jin said. “On the academic side, UM was also a perfect fit for my research interests in wildfires and smoke, and I was especially excited to work with experts like Lu Hu and Bob Yokelson.”
Jin also grew up in Hangzhou, China, a major metropolitan area, and he wanted to experience the different lifestyle and mountain environment offered by UM and Missoula.
“UM gave me that, and it also gave me strong mentoring and the chance to do impactful research in a region where wildfire smoke is an important real-world problem,” he said. “During my Ph.D., I built skills using different kinds of models to interpret field measurements and connect observations to atmospheric chemistry.
“My next step is to develop deep expertise in satellite observations,” Jin said. “My goal is to combine field data, modeling and satellites so I can study air pollution from local and regional scales all the way up to the global scale.”
Jin’s article in Science Advances is titled “.” He is now a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University, where he will use satellite observations to study wildfire smoke and air pollution.
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Contact: Dave Kuntz, UM director of strategic communications, 406-243-5659, dave.kuntz@umontana.edu; Dr. Lu Hu, UM chemistry associate professor, 406-243-4231, lu.hu@mso.umt.edu; Dr. Lixu Jin, recent UM chemistry doctoral student, lixu.jin@umconnect.umt.edu.