NASA Scientist Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Dr. Anne Thompson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Thompson was one of 252 newly announced members, but the only NASA employee among them this year.

According to the organization's website, this year's 2021 election provides an opportunity to recognize extraordinary people who help solve the world's most urgent problems, create meaning through art, and contribute to the common good from every field, discipline, and profession.

Currently the Senior Scientist for Atmospheric Chemistry in Goddard's Earth Sciences Division, where she has worked for 26 years, Thompson was elected in the category of Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Earth Sciences. She also served as a Penn State Professor of Meteorology from 2005 to 2013.

Among other contributions, Thompson was recognized for her early work that used models to characterize the earth's oxidizing capacity and its relationship to the greenhouse gas methane. Thompson and colleagues described a pre-industrial atmosphere using methane measured in ice cores and proposed mitigation strategies to curb methane growth looking forward. The latter is now part of the new national climate strategy.

A veteran of dozens of NASA aircraft missions and other campaigns, Thompson's most recent field work was a 2019 oceanographic cruise to validate satellite data over the Gulf of Mexico. 'Although we found clear signals of the pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) near large oil-producing platforms, the average NO₂ and ozone concentrations were higher in air from the New Orleans area and near small gas wells.'

Thompson initiated NASA's SHADOZ (Southern Hemisphere Additional Ozonesondes) in 1998. She has been principal investigator of the 14-station tropical network ever since, amassing nearly 10,000 ozone profiles while building capacity that enables nations like Kenya and Indonesia to meet obligations to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. SHADOZ data over the past 22 years show ozone losses in the lowermost tropical stratosphere. These tropical losses are caused by an increase in tropopause height, the location of the boundary between troposphere and stratosphere. According to Dr. Paul A. Newman, Chief Scientist for Earth Sciences at NASA Goddard, 'This means ozone depleting compounds are not causing the tropical ozone decline but rather, small climate changes are responsible.'

Thompson's community contributions have included stints as president of the International Commission on Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Pollution and the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) Atmospheric Sciences Section. Her honors include a Fulbright Scholar Award, the American Meteorological Society or AMS Verner Suomi Award, the AGU Roger Revelle Medal, and a Corresponding Membership in the Academy of Athens. She received Goddard's William Nordberg Memorial Award for Earth Sciences in 2018 for 'fundamental contributions to the understanding of the interactions between tropospheric composition and climate.'

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was established in 1780 by its founders to provide scientific guidance and expertise the young nation would need to navigate its early challenges. For more information about the Academy, visit: https://www.amacad.org/news/2021-member-announcement

For more information about Dr. Thompson, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/anne-thompson-adventures-in-the-atmosphere /

and: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/anne-thompson-adventures-in-the-atmosphere-part-two/

A video of Dr. Thompson's October, 2018 William Nordberg Memorial Lecture Titled: Variability In Ozone Structure: Insights From Strategic Ozonesonde Networks is found here: https://mediastream.ndc.nasa.gov/Public3/webvid/SCI/2018/GSFC-2018-SCI-1031/default.html

Dr. Anne Thompson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11577 (4^th video down on the list)