Congratulations to Crows now Dr AR & JK on getting their degrees today. Best of luck to you both!

How to help try to save ozone research at Environment Canada

Bottom line: The Harper Government is in the processes of eliminating Environment Canada’s long-standing program of routine monitoring of atmospheric ozone

Details:
Canada has a long history as a world leader in ozone research. It houses the World Ozone Data Centre. Which is more ironic? That much of the world’s ozone monitoring is done with Canadian designed and build Brewer-Dobson spectrometers. Or that it was just confirmed climate conditions have evolved to where a ozone hole has been confirmed in the Northern Hemisphere using in part these measurements (which of course won’t exist to track the hole in coming years if we allow this program to be cancelled).

The current government in Canada is proposing to eliminate atmospheric monitoring of ozone. Colleagues at The University of Toronto have gotten Kirsty Duncan (Liberal environment critic)  to present a petition on this issue. She is willing to present the petition again, if she gets additional copies with at least 25 signatures, and in fact is encouraging this to help keep up the pressure. 

Any Canadian resident who collects 25 signatures, can mail them (no postage needed) to: Kirsty Duncan, MP, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6. Only original signatures are acceptable; no faxes o

r scans. Petitions need to be judged to be compliant with the rules regarding such things, so it is wise to send them to Kirsty's staffer first, Ryan Murphy, who can "pre-clear" them with the House clerk. Just send them to kirsty.duncan@parl.gc.ca and ask Mr. Murphy to check them. 

A sample petition is available below.

ozone_petition.pdf
Download this file

Go ride a bike and make our job easier at the #westernu #lidar

High Arctic troposphere is cleaner in the summer than the winter?

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, L16805, 6 PP., 2011, doi:10.1029/2011GL048221

 The role of scavenging in the seasonal transport of black carbon and sulfate to the Arctic

Key Points

• Arctic aerosol have a strong seasonal cycle that is dominated by wet scavenging


• Both soot and sulfate are affected nearly equally by wet scavenging processes


• We can anticipate from this study that a warmer Arctic will be a cleaner Arctic

Timothy J. Garrett, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Sara Brattström, Meteorologiska Institutionen, Stockholms Universitet, Stockholm, Sweden

Sangeeta Sharma, Environment Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Douglas E. J. Worthy, Environment Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Paul Novelli, GMD, ESRL, Boulder, Colorado, USA

In a prior study, a decade-long dataset of ground-based aerosol and carbon monoxide measurements from Barrow, Alaska (71°N, 157°W) was used to show that surface air in the Arctic is clean during the summer, less due to inhibited transport of pollutants from mid-latitudes, and more because of efficient wet scavenging at temperatures near freezing. Here, the analysis is extended to light-absorbing aerosols, such as black carbon, and to measurements from Alert, Canada (82°N, 62°W). The data imply that both light scattering and light absorbing aerosols have similar seasonal cycles, independent of location, and they are controlled nearly equally by wet scavenging. Removal is particularly efficient at high relative humidities and warm temperatures, which suggests that a future warmer and wetter Arctic may also be cleaner. Assuming aerosol pollutants generally have a warming effect in the Arctic, such an increase in wet scavenging would represent a negative Arctic climate feedback.

Citation: Garrett, T. J., S. Brattström, S. Sharma, D. E. J. Worthy, and P. Novelli (2011), The role of scavenging in the seasonal transport of black carbon and sulfate to the Arctic, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L16805, doi:10.1029/2011GL048221.

via agu.org

This recent paper uses aerosol and temperature measurements from Barrow and Alert to show that warmer, wetter summers cause the air at high latitudes to be cleaner in the summer than the winter. No quite what I expected, I'll have to look into this further.