NASA airborne campaigns to tackle questions on climate

WASHINGTON: Five new NASA airborne field campaigns will take to the skies next year to investigate how long-range air pollution, warming ocean waters, and fires in Africa affect our climate.

These studies into several incompletely understood Earth system processes were competitively-selected as part of NASA's Earth Venture-class projects. Each project is funded at a total cost of no more than $30 million over five years.

Steven Wofsy of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will lead the Atmospheric Tomography project to study the impact of human-produced air pollution on certain greenhouse gases.

Airborne instruments will look at how atmospheric chemistry is transformed by various air pollutants and at the impact on methane and ozone which affect climate.

Michael Behrenfeld of Oregon State University will lead the North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study, which seeks to improve predictions of how ocean ecosystems would change with ocean warming.

The mission will study the annual life cycle of phytoplankton and the impact small airborne particles derived from marine organisms have on climate in the North Atlantic.

Kenneth Davis of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, will lead the Atmospheric Carbon and Transport-America project to quantify the sources of regional carbon dioxide, methane and other gases, and document how weather systems transport these gases in the atmosphere.

Jens Redemann of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, will lead the Observations of Aerosols above Clouds and their Interactions project to probe how smoke particles from massive biomass burning in Africa influences cloud cover over the Atlantic.

Particles from this seasonal burning that are lofted into the mid-troposphere and transported westward over the southeast Atlantic interact with permanent stratocumulus "climate radiators", which are critical to the regional and global climate system.

Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will lead the Oceans Melting Greenland mission to investigate the role of warmer saltier Atlantic subsurface waters in Greenland glacier melting.

The study will help pave the way for improved estimates of future sea level rise by observing changes in glacier melting where ice contacts seawater.