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Press Releases Air monitoring yields surprises SEAN GOODWIN Union Leader Sunday News Correspondent August 12, 2002 DURHAM - Local and federal organizations are working toward the end of a month-long program testing air pollution around New England and, even though it is too early for definitive conclusion, researchers did note that they were surprised by the "tremendous" amount of pollution coming from recreational and commercial boats. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the northeast section of the country has some of the worst air quality in the nation. A big reason for that is New England is directly downwind from many large industrial centers. In July, NOAA sent its largest research vessel to New England from its base station in Charlestown, South Carolina. The goal of the ship and its crew will be to monitor air pollutants and how they travel through the region. "With the combined capabilities of several NOAA research laboratories and our university colleagues, we have assembled the most complete package of atmospheric gas and particle sampling instrumentation ever deployed aboard Ronald H. Brown," said Tim Bates of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. "These measurements should give us a much better understanding of the transport and transformation of pollutants in this region." The month-long New England Air Quality Study, partially initiated by the NOAA-funded Atmospheric Investigation, Regional Modeling, Analysis and Prediction (AIRMAP) project headquartered at the University of New Hampshire, involves more than 20 partner institutions. In addition to the heavily instrumented ship, a G-1 Gulfstream research aircraft operated by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) will also collect data with instruments developed at both PNNL and DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory. According to Robert Talbot, director of the AIRMAP Cooperative Institute and professor of Earth science at UNH's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, there have been stationary instruments around the state, but the boat and the airplane give researchers mobility. The Ronald H. Brown is 274 feet long, 52.5 feet wide and it weighs about 3,250 tons. The ship has been about two miles off the coast in the Gulf of Maine, according to Barbara McGehan, a public affairs official at NOAA. That distance will change depending on the level of pollution in the water on any particular day. The fact that the ship is lower to the surface and can obviously move slower than the plane gives it an advantage in testing the sea breeze effect, according to Talbot. Ê Talbot added that the sea breeze effect occurs during the summer when air flows inland due to heating of the air over land, and then gets pushed back out to the sea when cooling occurs later in the day. The only way to determine the sea breeze effect is to monitor the air off the coast at different locations. A mobile research platform such as a ship is ideal for these applications. On the other hand, Talbot said the airplane, which has completed its assignment, is able to detect vertical information, such as gas and aerosol dispensation. "The plane has the ability to sample over abroad range of distances and can look vertically in the atmosphere," addedPeter Daum, the lead investigator from Brookhaven. "This lets us understand how these pollutants are distributed in space and how they relate to the sources of these pollutants." In addition to the ship and the airplane, there will also be seven integrated wind-profiler systems will be deployed at various sites in New York and around New England. These systems, which measure wind and temperature, will help document the transport of pollution into and out of the Northeast. "We have been sitting in a stationary area measuring what is coming to us. With the ship, aircraft and additional ground instrumentation, we'll be able to go upwind and tell what is in the air coming our way," Talbot said. According to Talbot, the project should add to researchers' understanding of where pollution comes from and how to forecast air quality in the region. |
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