The short lifetime of aerosol particles in the atmosphere means that they tend to be found concentrated in regions close to where they were formed. As they only last for days to weeks in the atmosphere, they don’t travel too far as the Earth’s winds aren’t able to fully mix the air over such a short period. This short lifetime should also mean that any changes in the emissions of ...[Read More]
Aerosol particles come in lots of different flavours and one of their most important properties is how they deal with incoming sunlight. Some are rather unwelcoming and send sunlight back to whence it came (space), which leads to a cooling of the atmosphere as the sunlight doesn’t reach the surface of the Earth. Others offer sunlight a warm(ing) embrace and absorb it, which heats up the atmo ...[Read More]
One of the key strands of the EGU so far this year has been discussion of the proposed new geological time period known as the Anthropocene. This concept was first proposed by the ecologist Eugene Stoemer in the 1980’s, with Nobel Prize Winner and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen bringing renewed attention to the term in the early 21st Century. It refers to the concept that the impact of hum ...[Read More]
My commute to work yesterday morning took an unexpected turn as my train pulled into my usual stop in Salford, Greater Manchester. To my right was a huge plume of smoke, which I would usually associate more with deforestation fires in Brazil! A plume of black smoke was rising up against the backdrop of beautifully clear skies, with the smoke gradually changing to a lighter shade of grey higher up. ...[Read More]
Smoke from a number of agricultural fires is currently blanketing Thailand and Cambodia. This is shown below in the satellite image from the MODIS instrument on the TERRA satellite. The red dots are classed as ‘thermal anomalies’ by the satellite instrument and are usually indicative of fires burning in these locations. The majority of the fires are occurring in grass and cropland area ...[Read More]
Now that the 2013 AGU Fall Meeting has ended, I thought I would roundup what I’ve been involved with over the week for both this blog and the Barometer Podcast, which I was recording each day with Sam Illingworth. Links to each piece are available below. Many thanks to all who have read and shared these over the past week. Recording the podcast at conferences is becoming a trend as we’ ...[Read More]
While preparing my poster for the upcoming AGU Fall Meeting, I downloaded some data on fire activity in South America for background on why we are interested in biomass burning in the region. I wanted to quickly check I had the data in the correct format, so I just plotted the coordinates of the fire counts without an outline of South America. I was surprised to see that the fire locations for Aug ...[Read More]
Last September I spent a month in Brazil for a research project aiming to study the pollution produced by deforestation fires in the Amazon Basin. The fires are mainly started by people for agricultural needs or land clearing for buildings and infrastructure. These fires produce huge amounts of smoke that blanket vast regions of South America during the “dry” season, which can lead to ...[Read More]
The past summer has seen a great deal of media coverage of fires burning across the globe. When I consider what to write about for the blog, it has often been difficult to avoid commenting on yet another instance of a fire burning somewhere. This has been especially difficult given my current research project investigates biomass burning aerosol from deforestation and agricultural fires in Brazil. ...[Read More]
A short post to illustrate the changing nature of aerosol in the atmosphere in terms of their spatial extent, source and properties. There are two images below showing the scene from the TERRA satellite as it passed over the Eastern Atlantic off the coast of Morocco. The first image shows the plume of smoke from wildfires from Madeira that swept through the island last weekend. The second image sh ...[Read More]
