Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
It's kind of pretty to look at, sort of like a lava lamp from 2006-2007
but it's not good and I don't expect that it has gotten any better.
Air pollution in Asia may be changing weather patterns in the United States.
Increasingly intense storms in the United States might have an unexpected origin: Asian air pollution. Researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have found that aerosols from across the Pacific strengthen extratropical cyclones—a type of storm system that drives much of our country's weather.
Asia is home to the world's 20 most polluted cities, but that dirty air doesn’t stay put, as the above animation of aerosol emissions shows. Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses around particles, and an influx of particulate matter—say, from a coal-fired power plant—can produce bigger, badder clouds. So far, the atmospheric scientists have only looked at how pollution from the continent affects North American weather, but they expect that the effects are global in scale. When countries around the world finalize carbon emissions commitments this year, let’s hope they remember we’re on different sides of the same planet.
http://www.onearth.org/earthwire/asia-pollution-us-weather?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=socialmedia
4 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
?itok=oMQDYUr2
Africa is front and center in this image of Earth taken by a NASA camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite. The image, taken July 6 from a vantage point one million miles from Earth, was one of the first taken by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC).
Central Europe is toward the top of the image with the Sahara Desert to the south, showing the Nile River flowing to the Mediterranean Sea through Egypt. The photographic-quality color image was generated by combining three separate images of the entire Earth taken a few minutes apart. The camera takes a series of 10 images using different narrowband filters -- from ultraviolet to near infrared -- to produce a variety of science products. The red, green and blue channel images are used in these Earth images.
The DSCOVR mission is a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force, with the primary objective to maintain the nation’s real-time solar wind monitoring capabilities, which are critical to the accuracy and lead time of space weather alerts and forecasts from NOAA.
DSCOVR was launched in February to its planned orbit at the first Lagrange point or L1, about one million miles from Earth toward the sun. It’s from that unique vantage point that the EPIC instrument is acquiring images of the entire sunlit face of Earth. Data from EPIC will be used to measure ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and a variety of other features.
Image Credit: NASA
Al Gore posted this on Facebook about two hours ago.
