Professor Talbot's interests encompass regional-to-global scale atmospheric circulations and associated transport of trace constituents. His research areas include: distribution, composition and chemistry of reactive odd-nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere; intercontinental transport of trace gases and aerosols; regional tropospheric chemistry and climate change in New England; climate-air quality connections; biosphere-atmosphere exchange of trace gases; and development of advanced instrumentation for the measurement of reactive trace gases and aerosols (ground, aircraft, and autonomous platform based). His work on these topics has appeared in more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed professional journals and he is in the top 0.5% of researchers world-wide in Geosciences for citations to his publications (selected as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher).

He is Chief Scientist of the NOAA funded AIRMAP and Targeted Wind Sensing (TWS) programs. He leads the AIRMAP team of scientists in the investigation of regional atmospheric chemistry, dynamics, and climate change in New England. In collaboration with NOAA, AIRMAP conducted the New England Air Quality Study in 2002 and the international follow-up study, ICARTT 2004, which involved hundreds of scientists and 13 research platforms from NOAA, NASA, DOE, and several European partners. His Targeted Wind Sensing program conducted the first transatlantic flight with a low-level balloon drifting in air masses from one continent to another and continuously measuring O3 and meteorological conditions.

He has also been part of NASA's Global Tropospheric Chemistry program since 1983, serving on the science team for 14 major airborne expeditions supported by this program. Aboard NASA research aircraft he studied tropospheric chemistry, photochemical mechanisms, continental and convective outflows, long-range transport, and biogeochemical cycling over the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic basins, North American boreal and Arctic ecosystems, and central Amazonia. He has investigated the influence of biomass burning emissions from South America and Africa on atmospheric chemistry over the South Atlantic and Pacific basins. Other work has focused on the transport of nutrients by Saharan Dust and their input to surface waters of the tropical Atlantic and Amazonian ecosystem.

His research group participated in two airborne missions supported by the NASA Atmospheric Effects of Aviation/Subsonic Assessment (SASS) program to study the effects of subsonic aircraft emissions on atmospheric chemistry and ozone production in the upper troposphere. His group participated in the NSF/NCAR Tropospheric Ozone Production about the Spring Equinox (TOPSE) experiment on the NSF C-130 aircraft to document long-range transport and photochemical processes in the Arctic during the winter to late springtime period. His group has also studied the atmospheric input of reactive odd-nitrogen to mid-latitude forests and the Gulf of Maine while other projects have focused on urban metabolism and trace gas respiration associated with medium and large metropolitan areas in New England. Additional research areas include biosphere-atmosphere exchange of carboxylic acids and methyl halides, with one of his early studies establishing the geochemical cycling of carboxylic acids in the troposphere.

Professor Talbot is the chairman of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Membership Committee, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the UNH member representative to UCAR. He has received NASA Group Achievement Awards for four airborne expeditions (1993, 1995, 1998, and 2005) and was selected for inclusion in the AcademicKeys Who's Who in Sciences Higher Education.