In the image to the right, heavy aerosol concentrations appear in shades of brown, with darker shades representing greater concentrations.
Areas lined in black on the land surface represent human population. Notice how heavy aerosol production and dense population areas correspond. Also notice how there are dense patches of red points in East Asia. These correspond with intense forest fires, sending vast quantities of aerosols into the atmosphere.
Although this image gives the impression that the fires and plumes of aerosols may not be connected, in fact they are. There’s a direct relationship between those fire points and the brown patches appearing to the east.
Hongbin Yu, an associate research scientist of the University of Maryland Baltimore County working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., grew up in China and taught there as a university professor, where he witnessed first-hand and studied how pollution from nearby power plants in China affected the local environment.
Yu teamed with other researchers to take advantage of the innovations in satellite technology and has now made the first-ever satellite-based estimate of pollution aerosols transported from East Asia to North America.
The new measurements were made from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument orbiting on NASA’s Terra satellite.
