Smog, Pollution in India, China responsible for disrupting weather patterns in the US
Study by Texas A&M University.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: As the US recovers from one of the most unpredictable and brutal winters of the last several years, it turns out that the cause of such wild weather patterns in the States could be the intense smog and pollution in China and India.
Scientists at Texas A&M University have discovered that the increasing levels of toxins in the air above Earth’s two most populous nations are so dense, that they may actually be disrupting natural weather patterns.
The study says that although it’s difficult, if not impossible, to put a quantifiable number on the influence smog has on weather in the Western hemisphere, analysis of satellite imagery and computer data models offer irrefutable proof that a relationship certainly exists.
“Increasing levels of air pollutants in Asia have recently drawn considerable attention, but the effects of Asian pollution outflows on regional climate and global atmospheric circulation remain to be quantified,” says the report. “Our work provides, for the first time to the authors’ knowledge, a global multi-scale perspective of the climatic effects of pollution outflows from Asia.”
Climatologists have long known that aerosols and other pollutants eat away at the atmosphere’s ozone, a layer of organic compounds in Earth’s stratosphere that’s critical to protecting the planet’s inhabitants from the harmful effects of the sun’s radiation. In recent years, as the world has become more industrialized, that ozone layer has been eaten away at, and has been blamed by many as a key reason for global warming and other abnormal climate behavior.
The new study, entitled “Assessing the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on Pacific storm track using a multi-scale global climate model,” says that China and India have been responsible for a lot of the damage done to the ozone layer. In a statement, lead author Renyi Zhang said that a “dramatic increase in atmospheric aerosols – mostly sulfate and soot from coal burning,” has led to rapid dissolution of ozone and the augmentation of potentially devastating climate change around the world.
The toxins in smog produced in the East ride across wind currents over the Pacific, ultimately affecting the weather in the US and Canada. With less ozone protection due to chemical toxins, storms become more frequent, intense, and erratic. This, says the report, is in addition to climate change happening in other parts of the world from an increase in exposure to the sun, which has mostly caused rapid melting of the polar ice caps and rising sea levels.
Zhang said that predicting how weather in North America will change at any given time is difficult, but that “it’s almost certain that weather in the US is changing.” Deep convective clouds, which are present during heavy storms, have increased because of smog in China and India, and that pollution from these two countries has to be mitigated as a crucial first step in solving this climate crisis.
Zhang, originally from China, is now the University Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Harold J. Haynes Chair in Geosciences at Texas A&M. He holds a B.S. in Atmospheric Science from China’s Nanjing Institute of Meteorology, an M.S. in Physics from the University of Nevada-Reno, and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry from M.I.T.
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