*The seminar will be in English, the event is open to the public.

Abstract 
One of the most challenging environmental problems in the whole Eastern Mediterranean basin is related to air pollution. Over Cyprus both ozone and aerosol air quality limits are often exceeded with photochemical episodes occurring mostly in summer, but also during winter, since at these latitudes solar radiation is intensive year-around. The contribution of natural emissions to these exceedances seems significant. Cyprus is highly exposed to dust episodes from both North African and Arabian Peninsula arid regions leading to high levels of particulate matter. It is also a receptor of a variety of chemical pollutants from Europe and Middle East that find a ‘cooking’ region of local and transboundary pollution, resulting in aged particulate species with different characteristics than the freshly emitted ones – consequently affecting PM levels over the area, the radiation budget and precipitation spatiotemporal distribution.

High ozone and aerosol concentrations are harmful for human health, ecosystems and affect climate change. It is therefore extremely important to characterize the present atmospheric composition over Cyprus, to identify contributing factors (local versus remote) and study chemical transformation processes that define the impact of the pollutants on the local and regional climatic patterns.

About the Speaker
Jonilda Kushta received her B.Sc. in Physics, M.Sc. in Environmental Physics / Meteorology and PhD in Meteorology / Atmospheric Modeling from the University of Athens, Greece in 2002, 2006 and 2014 respectively. During 2006-2015 she worked as research associate at the Atmospheric Modeling and Weather Forecasting Group at the University of Athens. Since December, 2015, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Energy, Environment and Water Research Center of the Cyprus Institute working on air quality modelling. Her fields of expertise include atmospheric modeling, air pollution, dust cycle in the atmosphere, impacts of pollutants on regional weather, severe atmospheric phenomena (e.g. hurricanes, floods, dust storms).

As a researcher she has participated in more than ten (10) international and national projects related to atmospheric processes, air pollution and climate change. She is one of the main developers of RAMS/ICLAMS model that treats explicitly the direct and indirect aerosol effects in the atmosphere. She has seven (7) publications in peer review journals and more than 30 presentations in scientific conferences on atmospheric fields.

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This event is part of the CyI Seminar Series.  View all CyI events.