Air Pollution, Aerosols and Clouds in the Climate System

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...