My fourth and fifth days at the AGU Fall Meeting involved dashing between multiple sessions to take in a number of talks on (surprise, surprise) aerosols! The main strand running through them from my point of view was how there are major efforts to construct large datasets of aerosol properties that can be used to test our understanding via numerical models. Aerosols are complex and tend to stick ...[Read More]
AGU 2013 Day 3: secondary organic aerosol – animal or vegetable?
My third day at the AGU 2013 Fall Meeting involved lots of talks on one of the trickiest parts of aerosol science – secondary organic aerosol (SOA). We’ve known for several years now that SOA is ubiquitous across the globe and it is often the most dominant aerosol chemical species in many environments and this is particularly true in the industrialised regions of the Northern Hemispher ...[Read More]
AGU 2013 day 2: aerosol emissions, climate & the IPCC
My second day at the AGU 2013 Fall Meeting revolved around more short-lived climate forcers, which I wrote about yesterday and also a broader session on the results from the recent IPCC Working Group 1 report. The latter was an opportunity for the community to quiz some of the lead authors of the report on a variety of issues including observations of the climate system, aerosol and clouds (yippee ...[Read More]
AGU 2013 day 1: Short-lived climate forcers
My first day at AGU 2013 revolved around sessions on short-live climate forcers, which are components in the atmosphere that have short lifetimes (compared to carbon dioxide for example) and generally warm the atmosphere. Reduction of these compounds, such as methane and black carbon, has been mooted as a way to reduce global mean temperatures in coming decades. This is summarised in the figure be ...[Read More]
A continent on fire
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]
Spoiling the view
Probably the most obvious manifestation of air pollution comes when looking out of the window and scanning the horizon – does the landscape go on for miles or is the view reduced? The build-up of air pollution can often dramatically reduce visibility via a shroud of haze. On a recent trip to the Turkish Mediterranean coast near Antalya, the impact of air pollution on visibility was abundantl ...[Read More]
An aerosol is born: solving the nucleation recipe
One of the most fundamental aspects of aerosols that we are continually striving to understand is how they are actually born. One pathway that aerosol particles can take is a process known as “nucleation“. This nucleation process is where new particles are formed by gaseous molecules getting together and deciding that they’ve had enough of the gas-phase and would prefer to be tin ...[Read More]
The role of aerosol uncertainty in climate change
For those who follow [pun intended] the world of climate science on Twitter, you’ll very likely have noticed a string of tweets from a meeting at the Royal Society on the “Next steps in climate science“. The programme (PDF here) has included a wide range of topics relating to climate science and has included a number of scientists who heavily contributed to the recent IPCC Workin ...[Read More]
Biomass burning birthday
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]
Smoky summers
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]