Dr Paul Griffiths

I am an NCAS research scientist and University SRA working with Dr Alex Archibald. I am a member of the NCAS Science Strategy Board, and co-chair of the RMS Atmospheric Chemistry Special Interest group.  My interests are 

Ozone in chemistry-climate models 

• I was a Contributing Author the AR6 Chapter 6 on Short-Lived Climate Forcers., contributed to the TOAR BUDGET paper, led an analysis of some work that used our CCMI REFC1SD integrations and was a lead author of a paper that examined tropospheric ozone in CMIP6 models.  
• With James Keeble, I am co-chairing a TOAR-II group (ROSTEES) looking at stratosphere-troposphere transport of ozone.
• With Seb Hickman, I am co-chairing a TOAR-II group (ML4O3) looking at the use of machine learning and AI to understand tropospheric ozone, and I co-supervise a project at UKM, Malaysia looking at drivers of ozone in tropical regions.
• I am contributing to the TOAR-OPT project by performing some simulations looking at the drivers of recent historical ozone trends in the tropics.
• We are writing up the modelling work in the “Oxidant Budgets of the Northern Hemisphere Troposphere Since 1950” (OXBUDS) project together with Alex Archibald and Maria Zamyatina.  We're looking the impact of nitrate emissions and chemistry in UKCA. 
• Another project looks at the role of peroxy radicals from the perspective of a near-explicit common representative intermediates mechanism developed by Mike Jenkin and implemented in UKA by Scott Archer-Nicholls and James Weber.

Methane in the Earth System

• I am co-I with Alex on a recent Schmidt Futures Virtual Earth System Research Institute grant led by Alex Turner, Lee Murray and Vas Vlasenko - further details here
• Cambridge is a contributor to the TerraFIRMA project where I co-chair a sub-project to study the future impact of near-term climate forcers using UKESM1.  For this we are looking at the impact of the Global Methane Pledge, in collaboration with colleagues at the UK Met Office and UKCEH.
• My interest started with Ines Heimann's PhD (see this publication), and my colleague Zosia Staniaszek led a recent paper demonstrating the role of methane emissions in future climate in collaboration with the UK Met Office - based around this configuration of UKESM1.
• I have run some of the UK AerChemMIP consortium experiments using UKESM1 to look at the effect of methane in the chemistry-climate system.  These experiments were used in David Stevenson's CMIP6 evaluation paper for OH trends.

Heterogeneous chemistry, for which I do some development versions of UM-UKCA, and prepared a lecture for the NCAS UKCA Training Course. 

• Aerosol-oxidant-forcing interactions.  I did some analysis of oxidant effects on the radiative budget for a paper on the H2 economy, and presented at Cambridge Net Zero - you can find it on their YouTube channel
• Currently in a collaboration with Vichawan Sakulsupich, we are looking at feedbacks between oxidant and aerosol as part of the ACSIS analysis of tropospheric oxidants, and now as part of RAMIP with folks in Reading.  
• Earlier, I looked at the role of heterogeneous chemistry in halogen release which involved collaboration with researchers at the British Antartic Survey, running simulations to quantify the release of bromine from sea-ice.  This led to some box modelling of HOx/halogen chemistry interactions in this study.  On the subject of bromine, I led our contribution to the TRANSCOM-VSLS intercomparison project, headed by Ryan Hossaini at Lancaster, which looked at the transport and lifetime of very short lived halogen species and recent paper highlighted the effect of halogens on ozone levels in the troposphere.

Data-driven science.  I am involved in various data- and HPC-related activities: I am a Cambridge University 'Data Champion', am involved with the Center for Open Science as an 'Ambassador', the ESMValTool project and in 2022 I was resident on the Cambridge Accelerate Machine Learning Academy.  An example paper that Seb Hickman presented on the use of ML techniques to forecast ozone can be found here.

Teaching

Currently, I am a senior research fellow in chemistry and graduate tutor at Robinson College, for whom I have supervised at Part IA, IB and Part II level.  Previously, I was lecturer in the Part II course 'Chemistry of the Atmosphere' (2006-2009, and again 2016-2018), and have also lectured the A6 course 'Concepts in Physical Chemistry' (2012-2015).  I have also supervised the part II course 'High Resolution Spectroscopy' and the Part III interdisciplinary course 'Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Change' as well as sections of the Part IA and Part IB Geography tripos.  I've served as a University Examiner at Part 1B and have done some viva-style exams for the Chemistry Dept for Part III and for the probationary review of the PhD.