Last Updated on Sunday, 29 November 2009 00:09
"The Middle Atmosphere - Earth's Ignorosphere"
Dr Frank Mulligan (NUI Maynooth)
Thursday 26th November at 19:30, Botany Theatre
Trinity College Dublin
Biography
Frank Mulligan is a graduate of NUI Maynooth where he completed BSc (Mathematics and Experimental Physics) and PhD (Experimental Physics) degrees in 1978 and 1981 respectively. On completion of his doctorate, he was appointed to a lecturing position in physical sciences at Dublin City University.
He returned to Maynooth as a member of academic staff in the Department of Experimental Physics in 1984. Ten years later he became Dean of the Faculty of Science at Maynooth, and was appointed Vice-President/Deputy President of the university in January 1998. He held the role of Vice-President until July 2006, after which he returned to teaching and research in the Department of Experimental Physics.
In his work on atmospheric and particle collision physics, Dr Mulligan has carried out research in Spitzbergen, at City College New York, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Space Physics Research Laboratory of the University of Michigan, the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. His main interest is in the study of the Earth’s upper atmosphere through observations of optical emissions that originate at altitudes greater than 80 km.
Dr Mulligan became a member of the Board of the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland in 1997 and held the position of chairman of the Board from 2000 to 2006. He has been a member of the Senate of the National University of Ireland and the National Research Support Fund Board. He was the recipient of the Glen Dimplex Fellowship from the Ireland Canada University Foundation in 2006, and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2007.
About the lecture
Global climate change resulting from increasing concentrations of “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere threatens to alter radically the conditions for human habitation on our planet. Over the next 100 years, the average global air temperature is expected to increase by several degrees (~1.8-4.0 °C) bringing with it associated increases in sea level (~20-60 cm) and changes to ecosystems all over the world. In direct contrast to this global warming in the troposphere (sea-level to 15 km altitude), the atmosphere at higher altitudes (stratosphere (15-50 km altitude) and mesosphere (50-90 km)) is experiencing a cooling effect. The magnitude of this cooling effect could be up to ten times larger than the changes seen at the surface, because the very tenuous nature of the upper atmosphere makes it much more sensitive to change. This level of sensitivity makes the upper atmosphere a rich source for investigating the rate of change, and will be of enormous importance in the future to study the efficacy of actions by governments designed to mitigate the impact of changes.
The lecture will outline the reasons for the responses of different altitude layers to global change, and will present examples of measurements and model predictions for higher altitude layers.
