Earthsky Interviews
Private: Pollution from Asia found to intensify storms
05-24-2007 - Earth
That’s according to Renyi Zhang of Texas A&M University. What’s more, he says, this pollution has important consequences for global weather.
Zhang and colleagues found that the number of deeper Pacific storm clouds that tower high into the atmosphere near China and India has more than doubled over the last 10 years. Using NASA satellite imagery and state-of-the-art computer weather models, Zhang showed a link between intensified storms and Asian pollution.
Zhang told Earth & Sky that Asian factories pump soot and sulfate particles into the air. Prevailing winds send this pollution over the Pacific. A tiny soot particle can act as a “condensation nucleus,” he said. That’s a surface on which water vapor can condense into a cloud droplet.
Lots of pollution means lots of condensation nuclei, and lots of cloud droplets. The more cloud droplets there are, the smaller their average size, and the faster they rise. These cloud dynamics, along with other pressure and moisture conditions, result in intensified storms over the Pacific. These storms move across the west coast of North America, bringing wild weather in their wake.
Thanks today to “NASA”:http://www.nasa.gov – explore, discover, understand.
Dr. Zhang added: “The Pacific storm track is a very important weather event in the northern hemisphere during the winter, and a change in the storm track will likely have important consequences on the global weather and climate. Our research represents the first to suggest that the Pacific storm track is intensified by pollution from Asian continent over the past decade. This conclusion needs to be further verified by other studies. In addition, the exact effects of a changed Pacific storm track also need to be investigated by future studies by a large scientific community.”
Read Dr. Zhang’s paper on this topic in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Intensification of Pacific storm track linked to Asian pollution”:http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/13/5295?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=zhang+pollution&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
Our thanks to:
Professor Renyi Zhang
Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
Deborah- thanx for the (relatively) evenhandedness of reporting that — even if man-made polution is a large part of global climate degeneration — the problem area is NOT the USA.
I’d be a lot more inclined to accept that AlGore and the rest of his ilk were genuinely concerned if they were doing all of their fear-mongering in China and India, where the REAL problem actually is, instead of here in the US where the money&power is. It makes it pretty clear what their concern actually is.
Hello Bill. Thank you for commenting and for your kind words.
China and India are only now beginning a process of industrialization, similar to that which the U.S. underwent in the last century. In much the same way that U.S. cities and waterways were becoming polluted a few decades ago, until our lawmakers instituted measures for pollution control, so China and India are now undergoing a period of extremely polluted water and air. If we had measured pollution from the U.S. in the 1950s and ’60s, I suspect it would have looked very much like the Chinese and Indian pollution of today. It would have been U.S. pollution, not Chinese or Indian pollution, causing those storms to intensify. No one was measuring then, so of course we do not know. But it’s fairly well accepted that, in some sense, this sort of pollution is a “growing pain” of industrialized societies.
I suspect you and I would (personally) disagree about the motives of those who are presenting information about global warming to the public.
But (opinion aside) I can tell you that Al Gore is presenting a different issue – not the sort of pollution we discussed on the radio today – but instead a sort of “pollution” that is always a by-product of burning fossil fuels. Existing pollution control laws notwithstanding, all fossil fuel burning adds greenhouse gases to the air. And we in the U.S. are thus still very much involved in adding greenhouse gases to the air as we drive our cars and use our air-conditioners, run our factories … the thousands things we do every day to use fossil fuels. If you believe Al Gore and his ilk (the the thousands of climate scientists and scientific organization who agree with this scientific opinion on climate change), the U.S. is thus still very much part of the problem.
Thank you again for commenting. All opinions welcome here.
Best,
Deborah