Ph.D. Student Claudia Bernier Receives Outstanding Student Presentation Award


Presentation at the American Meteorological Society’s 25th Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry

Claudia Bernier, a University of Houston Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Ph.D. candidate, received the Outstanding Student Presentation Award from the American Meteorological Society’s 25th Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry in January 2023.

Claudia Bernier

Bernier, who has been an atmospheric science Ph.D. student since 2017, received the award for her poster titled, “An evaluation of LiDAR derived ozone curtain profiles from the TRACER-AQ campaign and WRF-Chem simulation.”

For her poster, she evaluated the performance of a chemical transport model (WRF-Chem) at fine resolution nested domains using multi-dimensional LiDAR measured tropospheric ozone profiles during the 2021 Tracking Aerosol Convection ExpeRiment – Air Quality (TRACER-AQ) campaign in Houston, TX.

The ozone profiles were measured by two LiDAR instruments from the Tropospheric Ozone Lidar Network (TOLNet) from NASA Langley Research Center and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The LiDAR measurements provide high temporal and vertical resolution ozone measurements that are valuable for evaluating the performance of chemical transport models in simulating trace gases in complex environments. Bernier’s Ph.D. research is funded by a NASA MUREP Graduate Fellowship.

The annual conference took place in Denver and online on January 8-12, 2023, with presenters and researchers from around the world and a multitude of topics relating to the atmospheric sciences.

Conference Image