Tuesday, December 15, 2009

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.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

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.