Peter Hess

About

Peter George Mueller Hess is a Professor in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. His research interests focus on understanding atmospheric chemistry within the context of the earth’s climate system. His work aims to advance understanding of how the chemistry and composition of the atmosphere may change over the 21st Century and to help prepare adaptive responses or mitigation strategies. These atmospheric changes not only drive climate change but also directly threaten human health, agricultural productivity, and natural ecosystems. Professor Hess's research involves integrating atmospheric chemical models and atmospheric measurements to understand atmospheric chemistry over the historical record and into the future. He studies how anthropogenic emissions, agricultural activities, and land use changes affect atmospheric composition and climate. His work includes projecting future climate change coupled with changes in atmospheric composition, which impacts future air quality. He emphasizes the importance of environmental monitoring and the use of complex numerical models of the earth’s system to gain predictive ability. Hess also teaches courses on climate change and atmospheric chemistry, communicating how climate models are used to make future predictions, how they are formulated and validated, and the aspects of models that can be relied upon or viewed with skepticism.

Research topics

• Atmospheric sciences
• Environmental science
• Meteorology
• Geography
• Chemistry
• Geology
• Environmental chemistry
• Oceanography
• Climatology
• Ecology

Selected publications

• An improved mechanistic model for ammonia volatilization in Earth system models: Flow of Agricultural Nitrogen version 2 (FANv2)

  Geoscientific model development · 2020 · 61 citations

  Abstract. Volatilization of ammonia (NH3) from fertilizers and livestock wastes forms a significant pathway of nitrogen losses in agricultural ecosystems and constitutes the largest source of atmospheric emissions of NH3. This paper describes a major update to the process model FAN (Flow of Agricultural Nitrogen), which evaluates NH3 emissions interactively within an Earth system model; in this work, the Community Earth System Model (CESM) is used. The updated version (FANv2) includes a more det…

  DOI

• Photocatalytic chlorine atom production on mineral dust–sea spray aerosols over the North Atlantic

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023 · 59 citations

  , thereby partially masking a much greater decline in this isotope, which has implications for the interpretation of the drivers behind the recent increase of methane in the atmosphere.

  PublisherDOI

• Extending the Atmospheric River Concept to Aerosols: Climate and Air Quality Impacts

  Geophysical Research Letters · 2021 · 59 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Despite strong impacts that aerosols have on climate and air quality, significant gaps remain in our knowledge concerning their long‐range transport, especially extreme transport events. With this consideration in mind and by leveraging the “atmospheric river” concept, this work develops an objective global algorithm for detecting aerosol atmospheric rivers (AARs), shows a climatology of AARs, elucidates their contributions to major global aerosol transport pathways, and illustrates how…

  DOI

• Global food loss and waste embodies unrecognized harms to air quality and biodiversity hotspots

  Nature Food · 2023-08-07 · 54 citations

  articleOpen access

  Global food loss and waste (FLW) undermines the resilience and sustainability of food systems and is closely tied to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals on climate, resource use and food security. Here we reveal strong yet under-discussed interconnections between FLW and two other Sustainable Development Goals of Human Health and Life on Land via the nitrogen cycle. We find that eliminating global FLW in 2015 would have reduced anthropogenic NH3 emissions associated with food produ…

  PublisherDOI

• Global environmental implications of atmospheric methane removal through chlorine-mediated chemistry-climate interactions

  Nature Communications · 2023-07-08 · 43 citations

  articleOpen access

  Atmospheric methane is both a potent greenhouse gas and photochemically active, with approximately equal anthropogenic and natural sources. The addition of chlorine to the atmosphere has been proposed to mitigate global warming through methane reduction by increasing its chemical loss. However, the potential environmental impacts of such climate mitigation remain unexplored. Here, sensitivity studies are conducted to evaluate the possible effects of increasing reactive chlorine emissions on the…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: ETBC--The Cycling of Nitrogen in an Earth System Model: Constraints and Implications for Climate Change

  NSF · $687k · 2010–2016

• Collaborative Research: Exploring the Chemical Reach of the Madden-Julian Oscillation: Satellite/In-Situ Data Analysis and Chemistry/Transport Modeling

  NSF · $250k · 2009–2013

• The Dynamical and Chemical Basis for the Future of Pollution Extremes

  NSF · $588k · 2016–2020

Frequent coauthors

• N. M. Mahowald

  Cornell University

  87 shared

• Sophie Szopa

  Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement

  56 shared

• Jean‐François Lamarque

  NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research

  56 shared

• Drew Shindell

  45 shared

• Arlene M. Fiore

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  41 shared

• Douglas S. Hamilton

  36 shared

• Guang Zeng

  Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics

  36 shared

• L. K. Emmons

  35 shared

Education

• BA

  Cornell University

  1979

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Tammo Steenhuish-89
• Minglin Mah-62
• Ashim Dattah-59