Anne M. Thompson

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 was born in Pennsylvania, but spent most of her youth growing up in New Jersey and New York State. She graduated from Chatham Township High School in New Jersey. Thompson received her bachelor degree in Chemistry, with honors, from Swarthmore College in 1970. She received her masters in chemistry from Princeton University in 1972 and then went on to get her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Bryn Mawr College in 1978. She did postdoctoral research at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, then at UC San Diego with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR),inBoulder, CO. During her postdoctoral work, Thompson's research focus shifted from physical chemistry to atmospheric chemistry, with influence from Ollie Zafiriou and Ralph Cicerone.

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 (SASS Ozone and Nitrogen Oxides Experiment) and PI for SHADOZ (Southern Hemisphere Additional Ozonesondes) whichused 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.

Thompson has published hundreds of scientific articles and been cited more than 18,000 times (as of Fall 2018). Her article "The Oxidizing Capacity of the Earth's Atmosphere: Probable Past and Future Changes", 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 (SHADOZ) 1998–2000 tropical ozone climatology 1. Comparison with Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) 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.

• Fellow, American Meteorological Society (AMS)
• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS), 2002
• Fellow, American Geophysical Union (AGU), 2003
• The SHADOZ research team won a NASA honor award for group achievement, 2004
• World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) sent Thompson a recognition letter for her contribution to the IPCC's Nobel peace prize winning report, 2007
• Fulbright Scholar Awardwhich 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