Conference: AOGS, 5-9 July 2010, Hyderabad, India

Asia Oceanic Geosciences Society will be organizing its 7th Annual Meeting in Hyderabad, India during July 5-9, 2010.

For more conference details click here

During this conference, we are hosting a special session on Atmospheric aerosols and their impact on climate and air quality. Please consider contributing to this session.

The deadline for abstract submission is March 1, 2010.

Session Description

Section	AS - Atmospheric Science
Session Title	Measurement and Modeling of Atmospheric Aerosols for Climate and Air Quality Applications

Session Description

The ever-growing population and human activities have led to a rapid and continuous increase in the emission of aerosols and its precursor gases in past several decades. Advancement in aerosol measurements and modeling capabilities in last two decades provides an opportunity to investigate the impact of anthropogenic activities on air quality, solar energy, regional and global climate and hydrological cycle. This session is concerned primarily with aerosols measurements and their application to climate and air quality over global regions. This includes, measurement techniques, data analysis, seasonal and long term trends, ground and space based remote sensing, aerosols and climate, observations related to air quality, use of satellite data for particulate matter monitoring, aerosol model development, model validation using ground and satellite data, assimilation of satellite products into regions and community air quality models. Also include emission of aerosols and its precursors, aerosol properties and radiative effects, aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions, regional climatic and hydrological effects of aerosol, and impact of climate change and variability on aerosol. Original studies using long-term ground observations, data from field campaigns, satellite measurements, and models are also solicited.

AGU Fall Meeting 2009 – Day 1 – Aerosols Talks and Poster

Well, as usual, the first day of the AGU meeting was very hectic, running around the sessions. All of the posters on aerosols had overwhelmingly important and interesting research. I had a poster in data fusion session where I presented aerosols optical depth products inter-comparison from multiple sensors during a field campaign in Saharan desert. I had a good discussion with Omar and Hiren about improvement in OMI aerosol product after introducing more spectral dependence of absorption. Jethva also had a poster, which demonstrated this new improved product for smoke aerosols. Lorraine Remer from GSFC presented a poster on possible inclusion of PARASOL and CALIPSO data sets into future MODIS aerosols product files. It will be very useful to have PARASOL AODs within MODIS files, which is more sensitive to fine mode aerosols. There was also a poster by Y. Shi along with Jeff Reid and J. Zhang analyzing uncertainties in MODIS and MISR over global regions and ways of correcting it for aerosols data assimilation into NAAPS.  There was also a poster by Salustro showing validation of Deep Blue product over bight targets. According to Salustro, Deep Blue will be available for all cases starting collection 6 MODIS data sets. I like the talk by Jeff Reid talking about considering various biases while utilizing multi sensor satellite data sets for assimilation and climate applications.

What is Carbon Trading?

Well, this is not exactly the aerosol related post. However, reducing carbon dioxide by incorporating newer technology will have side effect (of cause good) of reducing atmospheric aerosols, after all aerosols and carbon dioxide have more less similar source namely vehicular emissions, coal based power plants, etc. However, million dollar question is how society plans to pursue people and industry for reducing carbon dioxide emissions at global scale. One of the ways, politicians and economist come-up with is carbon trading. What is carbon trading? Can it achieve its stated objective? There are different opinions about it. Let us see one of the opinions in this video. Do you remember movie "Story of the Stuff", if yes then well this video is from same people.

The Story of Cap & Trade from Story of Stuff Project on Vimeo.

Potential impact of U.S. biofuels on regional climate

Recently, I came across this nice article published in JGR, which talks about impact of using biofuels on regional climate in the United States. The debate on using biofuels for future energy needs is on.

Abstract reads as

“Recent work has shown that current bio-energy policy directives may have harmful, indirect consequences, affecting both food security and the global climate system. An additional unintended but direct effect of large-scale biofuel production is the impact on local and regional climate resulting from changes in the energy and moisture balance of the surface upon conversion to biofuel crops. Using the latest version of the WRF modeling system we conducted twenty-four, midsummer, continental-wide, sensitivity experiments by imposing realistic biophysical parameter limits appropriate for bio-energy crops in the Corn Belt of the United States. In the absence of strain/crop-specific parameterizations, a primary goal of this work was to isolate the maximum regional climate impact, for a trio of individual July months, due to land-use change resulting from bio-energy crops and to identify the relative importance of each biophysical parameter in terms of its individual effect. Maximum, local changes in 2 m temperature of the order of 1°C occur for the full breadth of albedo (ALB), minimum canopy resistance (RC_MIN), and rooting depth (ROOT) specifications, while the regionally (105°W–75°W and 35°N–50°N) and monthly averaged response of 2 m temperature was most pronounced for the ALB and RC_MIN experiments, exceeding 0.2°C. The full range of albedo variability associated with biofuel crops may be sufficient to drive regional changes in summertime rainfall. Individual parameter effects on 2 m temperature are additive, highlight the cooling contribution of higher leaf area index (LAI) and ROOT for perennial grasses (e.g., Miscanthus) versus annual crops (e.g., maize), and underscore the necessity of improving location- and vegetation-specific representation of RC_MIN and ALB”

Complete Reference

Georgescu, M., D. B. Lobell, and C. B. Field (2009), Potential impact of U.S. biofuels on regional climate, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L21806, doi:10.1029/2009GL040477.

Read about different aspects of biofuels

http://bio-fuel-watch.blogspot.com/

Satellite Observation of Fires in Indian Oil Depot

India Oil Depot caught fire on October 29, 2009 at around 7:30 pm local time. This depot is located about 10 miles south of the Indian pink city Jaipur in the state of Rajasthan. Fire is so massive that the entire area is covered by black smoke clouds. Smoke and haze are visible up to 16 miles away from the fire location. This image is taken by NASA’s MODIS onboard EOS Aqua satellite on October 30, 2009 during its pass over India.

Original data for the image is taken from NASA’s MODIS Rapid Fire System and processed at University of Alabama in Huntsville, AL.

For more news on fire

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8333211.stm