Air Pollution can impact visibility in remote areas as well as in cities.
Click on image for full size
Source: T. Eastburn
Air Pollution and Atmospheric Visibility
Have you ever spent time in a large city? If so, the odds are you’ve seen the sky engulfed in a brownish-yellow or grayish-white haze due to air pollution. Such haze can reduce visibility from miles (kilometers) to yards (meters). Mountains or buildings once in plain sight can suddenly be blocked from view.
Air pollution that reduces visibility is often called haze or smog. The term smog originally meant a mixture of smoke and fog in the air, but today it refers to any mixture of air pollutants that can be seen. Smog typically starts in cities or areas with many people, but because it travels with the wind, it can appear in rural areas as well.
One consequence of smog over any given area is that it can change the area’s climate. Certain dark particles, such as carbon, absorb solar radiation and scatter sunlight, helping produce the characteristic haze that fills the skies over the world’s megacities. This haze reduces the amount of the Sun’s energy reaching the Earth’s surface, sometimes by as much as 35 percent.
A reduction in sunlight may not be the only thing air pollution inhibits. Some research has supported the idea that certain air particles are altering rainfall patterns as well. Although particles in the air form the nucleus that attracts cloud moisture into water droplets, specks of soot or black carbon may be too small to produce raindrops big enough to hit the ground. Since rain flushes pollutants from the atmosphere, visibility could be negatively impacted as a consequence.
Scientific field campaigns such as MILAGRO are one way scientists can research atmospheric processes to prove or disprove such ideas. For now, if rain isn't in the forecast when atmospheric visibility is low and smog is high, than wind is likely your best hope for a return to clear skies.
Last modified February 19, 2006 by Teri Eastburn.
Shop Windows to the Universe Science Store!
The Fall 2009 issue of The Earth Scientist
, which includes articles on student research into building design for earthquakes and a classroom lab on the composition of the Earth’s ancient atmosphere, is available in our online store
You might also be interested in:
What do smog, acid rain, carbon monoxide, fossil fuel exhausts, and tropospheric ozone have in common? They are all examples of air pollution. Air pollution is not new. As far back as the 13 th century,...more
MILAGRO stands for Megacity Initiative: Local and Global Research Observations. What that really means is that a team of researchers from around the world is in Mexico City to study the atmosphere there....more
When you look up at the sky, you are looking at more than just air. There are also billions of tiny bits of solid and liquid floating in the atmosphere. Those tiny floating particles are called aerosols...more
Rainbows appear in the sky when there is bright sunlight and rain. Sunlight is known as visible or white light and is actually a mixture of colors. Rainbows result from the refraction and reflection of...more
The Earth travels around the sun one full time per year. During this year, the seasons change depending on the amount of sunlight reaching the surface and the Earth's tilt as it revolves around the sun....more
Scientists sometimes travel in specially outfitted airplanes in order to gather data about atmospheric conditions. These research aircraft have special inlet ports that bring air from the outside into...more
An anemometer is a weather instrument used to measure the wind (it can also be called a wind gauge). Anemometers can measure wind speed, wind direction, and other information like the largest gust of wind...more