International science journal “Nature” featured a story and quoted a UALR science professor this month on a new study scrutinizing Europe’s air quality and building regional air-pollution models for every city in the world with a population of more than five million.

The “Nature” story quoted UALR Professor Jeff Gaffney, chair of the Department of Chemistry, on the importance of studying mega-cities and their pollution to determine the long-range impact of pollution and climate.

From the “Nature” report: “Studying many megacities together is crucial to building better regional models, says Jeffrey Gaffney, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, who is not involved in the project. Moreover, he says, as cities worldwide differ in how they deal with pollution, studying many cities will itself provide benchmarks and better predictions of what works best in improving urban management of emissions.

“The collaborative approach in MEGAPOLI is a good one,” he notes. “By combining efforts, the sum of the instrumentation, expertise and quality of the data is greater than any one investigator could ever hope to mount.”

Gaffney is the lead scientist for the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Science Program’s Megacity Aerosol Experiment – Mexico City (MAX-Mex).

The MAX-Mex field study was part of a larger collaboration with the National Science Foundation, NASA, and Mexican Agencies called the Megacity Initiative: Local and Global Research Observations (MILAGRO).