Susan Strahan

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Her research combines the Global Modeling Initiative (GMI) chemistry and transport model with satellite trace gas observations to study the composition in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. She is involved in the development of model transport diagnostics and their application to evaluating credibility of chemistry climate models.

BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Susan Strahan received a BS in chemistry from Stanford University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. As an NRC postdoc at NASA Ames Research Center, her research involved making stratospheric trace gas measurements with an airborne spectrometer on the NASA ER-2. As a visiting scientist at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab (GFDL) from 1990-2, she continued the analysis of those measurements, using the results to evaluate the polar transport in the GFDL 'SKYHI' model. Since 1992 she has been at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, presently working in the Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Branch. Her research involves analysis of trace gas measurements from aircraft and satellite platforms. The observational analyses are used to develop diagnostics that evaluate the credibility of atmospheric models. She is the Project Manager for the Global Modeling Initiative. She contributes to the evaluation of the NASA GMI chemistry and transport models and chemistry-climate models.