Air Pollution—Largest Threat to Earth
“Nitrous oxide emissions over India is growing at an annual rate of 5.5 percent/year and the location of emission hot spots correlates well with the location of mega thermal power plants, mega cities, urban and industrial regions,” Ghude said. “Data from the 11-year time series of GOME and SCIAMACHY provide valuable information to improve estimates of nitrogen dioxide emissions as well as to identify the source regions and to study the regional ozone chemistry in light of seasonal meteorology.”
With global warming considered to be the largest threat to human life and environmental issues on Earth, the fact that air pollution is now added to that list of dangers should surprise no one. Premature deaths of individuals along with continuous changing of plant evolution, along with dangers for flora and fauna increasing, now require the satellites of NASA as the only effective global measurements for air-polluting emissions and transboundary movements.
At a recent meeting of scientists and researchers at the ESRIN, ESA’s Earth Observation Centre in Frascati, Italy, the European State Agency stated that the conference discussion involved the satellite data contribution in “monitoring nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere and to present the latest results of their ongoing atmospheric research that includes identifying hotspots, analyzing trends and monitoring the effectiveness of mitigation efforts.”
The data that was used in the conference participates was that which was acquired through the TEMIS project—part of ESA’s Data User Programme (DUP). This is a service which offers near-real time data products, according to ESA—long-term data sets and forecasts, from satellite instruments which are related to tropospheric trace gas concentrations, aerosol and ultra violet radiation.
So far the data has shown that there has been a serious increase in the emissions of gaseous pollutants in India over the past 20 years, according to Dr. Sachin Ghude of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM). This is mainly due to India’s rapid industrialization, urbanization, and traffic growth, with a varying distribution due to varying consumption patterns and growth rates.
The study used the nitrogen dioxide (NO2) data acquired from 1996 to 2006, taken from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) instrument aboard ESA’s ERS-2 satellite, along with the Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartograph (SCIAMACHY) instrument aboard the ENVIST. Through this, the major NO2 hotspots were able to be identified and the largest contributing regions.
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 18th, 2007 at 6:22 am and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
