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(Music)

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The images that I made

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basically came from a new instrument that's on the Suomi NPP satellite, called

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OMPS. OMPS main mission is to measure ozone

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but one of the other neat things it can do is, it can detect smoke and dust.

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What you are looking in the images is something that's called the aerosol index.

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The amount of aerosols in the atmosphere do depend on season.

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Typically you see a lot of smoke in the atmosphere during the spring.

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The smoke is essentially being produced by fires

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in sort of the boarder between Russia and China.

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In order to grow crops and clear the land, they start burning

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to clear whatever land they want to clear. In the case of these fires,

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the smoke can get lofted to four kilometers to maybe ten kilometers

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in the atmosphere. At that point they get picked up by higher level winds

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and they get transported globally. In this case we saw that the smoke

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was transported all the way to North America. And in certain cases we see

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smoke that actually circles the globe.

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The colors on the image are artificial. But what they are meant to convey

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is basically a sense of the density of the smoke. So that

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bluer and greener colors represent less smoke.

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The yellow and the reds represent more smoke.

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Along with the colors I sort of added a level of transparency.

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So, the less dense the smoke is, the more you can see

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through it and the more dense it is, the less you can see through it.

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Aerosols are an increasingly important

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aspect of studying what’s happening to the climate. Climate occurs over

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a long period of time. We need a long-term dataset to follow what

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is happening and to better understand what is happening.

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So, it is important to keep this climate record going and OMPS being

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the next instrument in line, it is going to pick up the slack and continue the record.

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(Music)