So we're here in Praia da Vitória in the Azore
Islands. That's on a latitude that's about the same as Washington
D.C. The other day we flew all the way from Ascension Island, which is about
500 miles south of the equator, up here
to Praia da Vitória. Now when we did that, we crossed from the Southern
Hemisphere into the Northern hemisphere. And in fact we crossed from the southern
climate into the northern climate. So the flight was
very interesting because on the Southern Hemisphere we
flew through a lot of biomass burning plumes, which were coming out of Africa,
and with our instrument we can measure the dust particles and the biomass
burning particles. And then we crossed the equator and then we
flew in this big huge Saharan dust plume coming out of
Africa traveling across the Atlantic ocean. Mineral dust is about half of
the globally emitted aerosol mass per year, and we got the chance
to measure all those dust particles and this will allow us to understand
the interaction of the dust particles with the climate.
Yeah, I think it's quite exciting to have this data and look at this.. So for the U.S. it's really important because, of course, all hurricanes
start, just around Africa in the Atlantic
ocean, they move across the Atlantic. So the dry air
and the dust getting wrapped into these hurricanes, they impact hurricanes.
So you're measurements are really really important for understanding this critical
science topic for people in the U.S.
Yesterday we flew from Lajes on the island of Terceira, which is the eastern
most island of the Azores. And we flew up over the Greenland ice sheet
as far north as we could and did a profile over
a measurement site called Eureka, which is about 85 degrees north.
Profiled down and then back in to Kangerlussuaq in Greenland.
We're on the western edge about midway down the island,
and behind me is the Russell glacier, which is fed by the
Greenland ice sheet, which is a huge source of water
to the oceans when this melts. If glaciers are over water,
they generally don't have any effect on sea level rise. But a glacier like this
that's on the land will have a huge effect on sea level rise. It's been
estimated that 80,000 gallons a day
comes out of these glaciers. On yesterday's flight,
we saw really high concentrations of CO and a lot of
biomass burning from all the fires in Siberia. Eventually
that biomass burning emissions, like black carbon,
they'll be deposited onto the Greenland ice sheet and here
here you can see a lot of the black debris that forms from that,
which actually makes it start to thaw out a lot quicker because of the dark
color that absorbs extra heat.
We're here at the end of the ATom-1 deployment.
For our last two flights we flew from Kangerlussuaq
in Greenland down to Minneapolis. And then we flew from Minneapolis
back to Palmdale. So on the flight from Kangerlussuaq, we actually saw quite
a lot of methane as we flew over the Hudson Bay Lowlands, and then we also
saw a lot of methane as we arrived in to do a low approach over Park
Falls, Wisconsin. The Hudson Bay Lowands are the largest source of natural
methane on the North American continent, so I shouldn't have been too surprised.
Wisconsin has quite a lot of agriculture, and there's a lot of
methane that comes from agricultural sources. So in the last flight
we found a lot of biomass burning aerosols again.
We have seen it during the whole campaign. So biomass burning is a big source for aerosols and gases
and with the climate warming up there is predictions showing that the number of fires
might go up. So is the tie-up at the end of ATom.
As you can see we actually have a completely empty aircraft. All
of the bigwigs and senior scientists have gone home, so it's just the
instrument people who are still here. But we've managed to get everything off in I think
record time, two days. It took us two weeks or more? I think it took us four weeks
to get everything in and it's really hard to believe that it took us less than
two days to get everything out. So we will see you all again in December
for the next start up of ATom-2, which will do the same flights
around the world and hopefully we'll get very different conditions for that.