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Pollution and Storms

According to a study by Chinese and American scientists, pollution from Asia is influencing weather conditions. Most man-made pollutants are smaller than natural aerosols and outnumber them, changing the size of water droplets that form clouds. These pollutants come from coal power plants and vehicles, and can both warm and cool the climate. Smaller man-made aerosols cause water droplets in clouds to form at higher altitudes and freeze before precipitating. Comparing 1850 to modern times, the researchers found man-made aerosols are spreading through the Pacific and strengthening winter storms by increasing their size, force, and ice content, altering global climate patterns.

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36 views

Pollution and Storms

According to a study by Chinese and American scientists, pollution from Asia is influencing weather conditions. Most man-made pollutants are smaller than natural aerosols and outnumber them, changing the size of water droplets that form clouds. These pollutants come from coal power plants and vehicles, and can both warm and cool the climate. Smaller man-made aerosols cause water droplets in clouds to form at higher altitudes and freeze before precipitating. Comparing 1850 to modern times, the researchers found man-made aerosols are spreading through the Pacific and strengthening winter storms by increasing their size, force, and ice content, altering global climate patterns.

Uploaded by

Nator17
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Pollution From Asia Makes Pacific Storms

Stronger
Tzotz
June 8, 2015

According to a study realized by a team of multiple Chinese and American scientists, weather conditions presented in the last decades have been
influenced by the pollution produced by Asia. Most of the aerosols polluting
the atmosphere have a smaller droplet size than the salt released by the ocean
into the atmosphere or the dust blown off the land, these man-made pollutants outnumber, at an increasing speed, the natural ones which changes the
size of the water droplets that create clouds.
Most of these pollutants are sulfates, resulting from coal fired power
plants, and also some other aerosols resulting from vehicular emissions and
industrial activities. These aerosols absorb sun light which makes them have
capabilities of both cooling and warming effects on climate. Since the water
droplets that form the clouds form when the water molecules in the air stick
to another body of bigger size, the size of the water droplets is directly proportional to the size of the object of which the water molecules have adhered.
Man-made aerosols being smaller than the natural ones means that the
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water droplets generated by these are smaller, therefore these droplets reach
higher altitudes to the point of forming ice before being able to precipitate
back out.
According to earlier investigations the amount of deep convective clouds,
including thunderstorms, had increased over the North Pacific between 1984
and 2005. And the conclusion was that the most likely reason for this phenomenon to occur was an increase in aerosol pollution from Asia.
Standard global climate models simulate the atmosphere at grid points
that are too widely spaced to resolve the fine-scale processes involved in cloud
formation, so the researchers had to combine a cloud resolving model with a
conventional climate model.
By comparing the preindustrial atmosphere of 1850 with the modern
one, the researchers came to the conclusion that man-made aerosols are now
spreading through the Pacific and having large effects on the winter storms,
increasing their force, size and the amount of ice they carry with them, which
in turn changes the global atmosphere, increasing the flow of heat from the
equatorial region toward the Arctic.

References
[1] National Geographic:

Pollution From Asia Makes Pacific Storms

Stronger.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/
140414-asia-pollution-aerosols-atmosphere
-weather-climate-science/
2

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