Anne M. Thompson is an American scientist, who specializes in atmospheric chemistry and climate change. Her work notably focuses on how human activities have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, climate forcings, and the Earth's oxidizing capacity, "essentially the global burden of oxidants in the lower atmosphere". Thompson was elected as a fellow to the American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and AAAS. She is a current member of NASA's Health and Air Quality Science Team.
Thompson has worked as a Physical Scientist for NASA from 1986 to 2004, and she returned in 2013 and is now part of the Atmospheric Chemistry Dynamics group. In 1990, Thompson was on the Third Soviet-American Gas and Aerosols cruise, aboard the former soviet R/V Akademik Korolev. The mission of this expedition was to explore air-sea gas exchange, and study trace gases in remote marine areas. it was a successful mission, and began Thompson's career in international atmospheric research. Thompson was co-mission scientist for NASA's 1997 DC-8 SINEX and PI for SHADOZ which used airborne instruments such as weather balloons carrying ozonesonde packages to measure humidity, temperature and other atmospheric factors. Thompson has also conducted studies with fellow NASA scientist Bob Chatfield, to identify a wind current carrying human made pollution from Asia westward, creating areas of unusually high ozone levers far away from the true causes, these studies also use satellite and weather balloon data. Thompson is an adjunct professor of meteorology at Penn State University were she teaches several courses, mentors, and acting as a thesis advisor.
Publications
Thompson has published hundreds of scientific articles and been cited more than 18,000 times. Her article , published in Science in 1992 fundamentally changed our understanding of the atmosphere's chemistry. Her thirty year research career has covered many topics related to coupled biosphere-atmosphere or ocean-atmosphere interactions -
Atmospheric sulfur cycle simulated in the global model GOCART: Model description and global properties, published in 2000 on the data collected from atmospheric sulfur cycle simulations.
Southern Hemisphere Additional Ozonesondes 1998–2000 tropical ozone climatology 1. Comparison with Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer and ground‐based measurements was published in 2003, on the research and ozone profiles gathered from a system of ten ozone measuring stations in the southern hemisphere and subtropics.
Convective transport of biomass burning emissions over Brazil during TRACE A published in 1996 followed the movement of trace gases produced by biomass burning.
Tropical Tropospheric Ozone and Biomass Burning published in 2001, maps ozone presence and smoke pollution from fires, other natural events as well as ozone trends and seasonal variability over time.
Fulbright Scholar Award which she used to study human pollution in South Africa, 2010
NASA Senior Goddard Fellow the most prestigious title NASA gives to its most accomplished researchers, 2014
American Meteorological Society's Verner Suomi Award for “exceptional vision and leadership in deploying technologies that have significantly advanced the understanding of ozone dynamics in the atmosphere,” 2012
Roger Revelle medal for “outstanding contributions in atmospheric sciences, atmosphere-ocean coupling, atmosphere-land coupling, biogeochemical cycles, climate, or related aspects of the Earth system," 2015
Goddard's William Nordberg Memorial Award for Earth Sciences, 2018
