Ground-level ozone is a secondary atmospheric pollutant that damages human and vegetation health. The chemical production of ground-level ozone involves the photochemical reactions between nitrogen oxides (NOX = NO + NO2) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). China is experiencing high levels of ozone due to high precursor emissions in association with rapid urbanization and industrialization in past decades.

The transport of biomass burning aerosols and the oxidation state of the marine boundary layer (MBL) play significant roles in understanding the background climate condition of the remote regions. Biomass burning is provoked by natural factors or humans and has a profound impact on ecosystems, carbon cycles, climate change, and human society. Biomass burning is one major source of atmospheric aerosols, which is a potential medium in fire-climate interactions because of its role in the global radiative balance and cloud processing.

In this thesis, I adopt ideas of finding the structure from randomness to recover the low-rank representations of the full subsurface extended image volumes which can give us access to any elements and image gathers. I derived the time-domain wave-equation based factorization via randomly probing which helps to remove the computational bottlenecks in both wave-equation solves and the imaging conditions. Also, I designed the framework combined with power iterations to increase the recovered accuracy without increasing the probing size.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas that can destroy stratospheric ozone. In marine environments, N2O is assumed to be produced and consumed solely by nitrogen-metabolizing microbes. It has been shown, however, that intermediate metabolites from these microbes can potentially leak out of cells and react with metal oxides to produce N2O. Recent studies have shown that the nitrification intermediate hydroxylamine (NH2OH) can chemically react with manganese (Mn) oxides in soils to yield N2O. Little is known about these interactions in marine systems.

Manganese oxides (MnO2) are ubiquitous in the environment and play an important role in the transformation and transport of contaminants in the environment and the biogeochemical cycling of carbon. This study investigated both aspects of these roles using a combination of laboratory experiments and field work. First, the kinetics of oxidation of the more toxic arsenic form, arsenite (As(III)), to the less mobile form, arsenate (As(V)), by MnO2 was determined and the mechanism of the reaction investigated.