NASA Takes on Arctic Haze Project
NASA Takes on Arctic Haze Project
“Other instruments allow us to tell where the air is coming from, its fingerprints of various pollution sources,” Hanwant Singh said. “Yet other instruments try to understand how the particles interact with clouds and how that might affect the Arctic climate.”
When the term “arctic haze” comes to the mind of NASA scientists, it refers to a layer of hazy aerosol pollution, consisting of industrial Eurasian emission of pollutants with occasional bits of black carbon in it, according to scientist Hanwant Singh who was sent to the Alaskan Arctic to study the haze phenomenon. Steve MacDonald in his KTUU.com online article, “NASA studies ‘Arctic Haze’ “, writes his article about what role Arctic haze may have to do with climate change.
Daniel Jacob, a NASA project scientist, also says NASA is trying to understand what role global change has to do with the Arctic. But to begin the process, they first needed to send a DC-8 jetliner to the area, crammed full of scientists and equipment to study the haze–basically a winged science laboratory. So far what they have begun to realize is that the warming of the Arctic is linked to the pollution transport from the northern latitudes.
Since the early part of this month, air samples have been taken from the numerous probes mounted on the sides of the jetliner—like in the photograph at the top of this article. The probes vent air into 20 different monitoring devices that have been lining the insides of the aircraft. Once inside the manifolds, the air arrives into a detection system which calibrates and quantifies it. Some of the instruments will measure how much the amount of particles is in the atmosphere.
While in flight, the scientists onboard coordinate with orbiting satellites around the poles, determining where pollution plumes are drifting in the sky areas. Once the jetliner finds them, it flies through it. “We are amazed by the complexity of the sources of pollution that things are coming from so many different places here,” Singh said. The pollution has been shown to arrive from China factories, European cars and trucks, and Russian wildfires, showing that the Arctic appears to be a melting pot for pollution, which arrives from thousands of miles away. “Those soot particles deposit in the snow and make snow a better absorber of solar radiation and therefore will tend to melt the snow faster providing a positive feedback for climate change,” Singh said. All of this refers to thefact that the Arctic is warming much faster than was previously thought by NASA scientists, with 150 scientist and support staff involved in the Arctic haze project.
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