Patrick Sheridan

Dr. Sheridan's primary responsibility is to oversee the operation and data flow of the NOAA/ESRL Global Federated Aerosol Network. The goals of this surface aerosol monitoring program are to characterize means, variability, and trends of climate-forcing properties of different types of aerosols, and to understand the factors that control these properties. The measurements from this network provide critical ground-truth for satellite measurements, as well as key aerosol parameters for global-scale models. Current research interests of Dr. Sheridan include working to improve and simplify the measurement of aerosol optical properties to better determine their effects on aerosol radiative forcing, efforts to reduce the uncertainties in aerosol black/brown carbon and aerosol light absorption measurements, investigation of water uptake and cloud nucleation properties of atmospheric aerosols, and working to better incorporate aerosol measurements from surface monitoring stations into global climate models.