"It's well-known that pollutants don't always stay in the region in which they are produced. What's not understood as well is where and when they travel," said Yuhang Wang, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Finding this large amount of NOx traveling from across the Pacific is important because it will allow us to build better models so we can better understand how pollutants created in one region of the world are affecting the other regions."
Wang, along with colleagues from Tech, the University of California, Irvine, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research studied data from the Tropospheric Ozone Production about the Spring Equinox (TOPSE) experiment when they found much larger amounts of an array of chemicals, including NOx, and ozone than predicted by current models.
Formed when fuel burns at a high temperature, any of the sources of NOx are manmade, with automobile exhaust, electric utilities and industrial activity responsible for the bulk of human-produced NOx. The amount of NOx available largely determines how much ozone, a major component of smog, is produced in most regions of the atmosphere.
"With a very small amount of NOx sitting around, as long as you have all these emissions of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons, the NOx sits there and continuously produces ozone. So in a way you really don't need a lot of it, but when you have a lot of it, it tends to produce ozone faster," said Wang.
Current models have shown
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Contact: David Terraso
d.terraso@gatech.edu
404-385-2966
Georgia Institute of Technology
16-Feb-2006