Air Pollution, Aerosols and Clouds in the Climate System

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 a...

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 .

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 cl...

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

www.blogactionday.org Earth and Information technology scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and at the Caelum Research Corporation, Rockville introduced a new online free access earth science journal, where short articles discussing various earth science phenomena can be published. The journal is open to everybody including students, researcher and scientists. I would recommend earth science students who would like to start on publishing their work, JESP is great place to start. It does not take lot of efforts to compose article for this journal, but make sure contains of article are scientifically sound. Below is description as given on their webpage. “Journal of Earth Science Phenomena (JESP) is an open access journal aimed at publishing micro-articles cataloging interesting and unique phenomena that are observed in Earth science data. The primary aim of this journal is not to report a detailed scientific analysis, but to promote further enquiry, document u...

Satellite remote sensing of particulate matter air pollution has shown tremendous potential for air quality monitoring over global regions with advancement in research and application over very short period of less than a decade. Recently, Air & Waste Management Association (AWMA) conducted a critical review of research on particle air quality monitoring from satellite observations. Critical review is conducted by experts in the field Ray Hoff from UMBC and Sundar A. Christopher from UAHuntsville. The Abstract reads as The recent literature on satellite remote sensing of air quality is reviewed. 2009 is the 50th anniversary of the first satellite atmospheric observations. For the first 40 of those years, atmospheric composition measurements, meteorology, and atmospheric structure and dynamics dominated the missions launched. Since 1995, 42 instruments relevant to air quality measurements have been put into orbit. Trace gases such as ozone, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, water...

Interesting article on impact of climate uncertainty on regional air quality appeared in ACP earlier this year. Model simulations of the extreme climate scenarios are found to have moderate effect on predicted emissions of VOC and ozone concentration in year 2050. Abstract Uncertainties in calculated impacts of climate forecasts on future regional air quality are investigated using downscaled MM5 meteorological fields from the NASA GISS and MIT IGSM global models and the CMAQ model in 2050 in the continental US. Differences between three future scenarios: high-extreme, low-extreme and base case, are used for quantifying effects of climate uncertainty on regional air quality. GISS, with the IPCC A1B scenario, is used for the base case simulations. IGSM results, in the form of probabilistic distributions, are used to perturb the base case climate to provide the high- and low-extreme scenarios. Impacts of the extreme climate scenarios on concentrations of summertime fourth-highest dai...

The special session on "A40: Evaluating Particulate Matter Air Quality with Surface and Space-Borne Measurements" is planned during coming fall AGU Meeting in San Francisco, 14-18 December, 2009. Following is the link for more details on session description. http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/program/scientific_session_search.php?show=detail&sessid=645 Abstract submission is open now and last date is September 3, 2009. we would like to invite you all to contribute to the session by submitting an abstract. Please forward this information to your colleagues and students. Following link provides guidelines to submit the abstract. http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/index.php#software Thanks and hope to see your abstract soon in AGU system.

I found a very interesting video about effects of aerosols on clouds and how the GLORY mission of NASA going to address this problem. Click on the image or the link below to view the video. Play video "The Cloud Makers" Image courtesy: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center