Carlos Szembek is a 2006 magna cum laude graduate of the University of Massachusetts Lowell where he earned his bachelor's degree in Atmospheric Science. He also earned a master's degree in Climate Dynamics at Yale University in 2010. While at UML Carlos was the president of the student chapter of the American Meteorological Society. He spent two summers taking part in NSF funded research programs in micrometeorology (through Clark Atlanta University; Atlanta, GA) and Arctic Climate (through Mount Holyoke College; Amherst, MA) on a glacier in Svalbard, Norway. Carlos is currently working at the Westford facility of AECOM.

Below is a short description of the research, presentations, publications he made as a UML student.

Research
Theoretical line shape calculations to determine the half-width and line shift for ozone transitions in the Earth’s atmosphere in support of satellite measurement campaigns such as NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites Aqua and Aura and the European Space Agency’s MASTER and SOPRANO instruments.
In order to make reliable calculations of the line shape parameters the vibrational of the polarizability and the dipole moment must be known. However the vibrational dependence of the polarizability is most important for determining the line shift and this was the focus of Carlos' work. Calculations of pure rotational transitions were made to determine the coefficients of the atom-atom potential by fits to measurement. The measurements chosen are for the pure rotation band of O3 so that the vibrational dependence of the dipole moment and polarizability play no role. Once the intermolecular potential is adjusted the vibrational dependence of the polarizability can be determined by fits to measurements made for transitions in the 3v3 band, the v1 band, and the v1 + v2 + v3 band.  Once these adjustments are made calculations will be made for the spectral regions used by the instruments onboard Earth monitoring satellites.  The data will also be used in the HITRAN database.

For a short description of the CRB formalism  click here



Presentations

  • September 15, 2005

Bobby Antony, Peter Gamache, Carlos Szembek, Danielle Niles, and Robert R. Gamache, "Modified complex Robert-Bonamy formalism calculations for strong to weak interacting systems," 19th Colloquium on High Resolution Molecular Spectroscopy, 11-16 September, 2005, Salamanca, Spain

  • April 25, 2006

Carlos Szembek and Robert R. Gamache, "A SEMI-EMPIRICAL ADJUSTMENT OF THE VIBRATIONAL DEPENDENCE OF THE POLARIZABILITY OF OZONE FOR USE IN LINE SHIFT CALCULATIONS," The Ninth Annual Student Research Symposium, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA

  • June 26, 2006

Carlos Szembek, Bobby Antony, and Robert Gamache, "A Semi-Empirical Adjustment of the Polarizability of Ozone for use in Line Shift Calcualtions," The 9th HITRAN Database Conference, June 26-28, 2006, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA

Publications

Bobby Antony, Peter Gamache, Carlos Szembek, Danielle Niles, and Robert R. Gamache, "Modified complex Robert-Bonamy formalism calculations for strong to weak interacting systems," Molecular Physics, 104, 2791-2799, 2006. Article or PDF preprint