Smoke from wildfires and agricultural burning has an important role in regulating climate.
Smoke emitted from wildfires and agricultural burning constitutes one of the largest sources of aerosol particles to Earth’s atmosphere. However, little is known about the importance of smoke on the climate system after it dissipates into remote areas of the planet.
A new study published in Nature Geoscience takes a new look at this faint, old smoke and finds that it is just as important an influence on the climate as the thick plumes produced by active fires.
The study, led by two CIRES researchers working for NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory, draws on data from NASA’s groundbreaking Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom), which sent NASA’s DC-8, packed with the state-of-the-art instrumentation, on four pole-to-pole flights over the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to search for short-lived pollutants in the most far-flung and unstudied parts of the atmosphere.
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