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Stephen Montzka

NOAA’s Stephen Montzka, of the Global Monitoring Laboratory, was named today as a 2022 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers to recognize their efforts to advance science or its applications. Montzka is among the more than 500 scientists, engineers, and innovators who have been elected 2022 Fellows.

Montzka, senior scientist for the Global Monitoring Laboratory, is recognized for his distinguished contributions to the field of atmospheric sciences, particularly for measuring and interpreting trends in greenhouse gas and ozone-depleting substance concentrations worldwide. He is among 26 AAAS Fellows elected from NOAA since 1976.

In his more than 30-year career at NOAA, Montzka has developed important records of global trace-gas concentrations related to ozone depletion, climate change, and air quality, addressing key issues in atmospheric science and informing international environmental policy.

His research includes a study documenting a peak in ozone-depleting gas concentrations in the mid-1990s following the adoption of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, the international treaty tasked with ensuring stratospheric ozone layer recovery.

Montzka led a team that detected a 2012-2018 increase in emissions of the banned ozone-destroying chemical CFC-11, a substantial violation of the Montreal Protocol. In follow-up investigations, he and his colleagues found that eastern China was responsible for most of the rising emissions. In a pair of 2021 Nature papers, they documented the subsequent decline in CFC-11 emissions globally and from eastern China between 2018 and 2019. The team’s work indicates that efforts to address the first known substantive violation of the Montreal Protocol are successful.

Recently, Montzka guided a collaboration between NOAA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enable the inclusion of NOAA’s measurement-derived estimates of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Inventory of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks.

Read the full press release at NASA