Asia Air Pollution and Climate Change
Tuesday March 6, 2007
The booming economy in Asia has been linked to changes in the weather on the West Coast of the United States. It seems that soot, trace metals, and other air borne pollutants are causing changes in the convection of storm clouds and finally the rainfall patterns affecting the Western coastal regions, possibly as far north as the Arctic.
"The pollution transported from Asia makes storms stronger and deeper and more energetic," said lead author Renyi Zhang at Texas A&M University. "It is a direct link from large-scale storm systems to [human-produced] pollution." Quoted by LA Times web site
Zhang and his team compared satellite photographs of the region from 1984 through 2005. The study, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, found that deep convective clouds had increased between 20% and 50%.
Monitoring stations on the West coast have found pollutants originating thousands of miles to the west. UC Davis atmospheric scientist Steven Cliff and his colleagues have found telltale chemical signatures of Asian particulates and other pollutants at several monitoring sites north of San Francisco and, during the last year, around Southern California.