Clearing the air
 thick, hazy brown cloud of pollution often hangs
over all of South Asia, affecting not only billions of the area residents’
health, but also the climate in which they live. The cloud is comprised
of a range of air pollutants, including microscopic particles from biomass
fuels like cow dung and fossil fuels. The particles contain black carbon,
sulfates and nitrates, which affect sunlight and rainfall in the region,
and possibly agriculture and fresh water supplies.
Through an ongoing National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration and United Nations Environment Programme-funded initiative,
Associate Professor Jamie
Schauer is part of an international team studying the brown cloud’s
effect on regional and global climate change, water balance, agriculture
and public health.
He and postdoctoral researcher Glynis Lough, and
PhD students Betsy Stone and Rachelle Duvall are helping to establish
observatories in the Maldives Islands, Midway Island, Nepal, Korea and
at Trinidad Head in the U.S. state of Oregon. At each station, they
train local personnel to collect air samples, then Schauer and his team
analyze the samples’ chemical composition and track the pollutants’
sources. With the data, researchers participating in the initiative
(dubbed Project Atmospheric Brown Cloud, or ABC) are developing models
to study near- and long-term changes in climate and brown-cloud composition.
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