New research suggests that China's impressive feat of cutting Beijing's pollution up to 50 percent for the 2008 Summer Olympics had some help from Mother Nature. Rain just at the beginning and wind during the Olympics likely contributed about half of the effort needed to clean up the skies, scientists found. The results also suggest emission controls need to be more widely implemented than in 2008 if pollution levels are to be reduced permanently.
Reporting their findings December 12 in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, co-author atmospheric chemist Xiaohong Liu at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National laboratory said, "In addition to the emission controls, the weather was very important in reducing pollution. You can see the rain washing pollution out of the sky and wind transporting it away from the area."
Liu and colleague Chun Zhao at PNNL and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing took advantage of the emission controls China put into play before and during the August Olympics to study the relative contributions of both planning and nature. Chinese officials restricted driving, temporarily halted pollution-producing manufacturing and power plants, and even relocated heavy polluting industries in preparation for the games.
To find out if the controls worked as well as people hoped, the researchers modeled the pollution and weather conditions in the area before, during and after the Olympics. They compared the model's results with measured amounts of pollution, which matched well.
Adding up the sources of pollution and the sinks that cleared it out, the team found that emission sources dropped up to a half in the week just before and during the Olympics. And while some pollution got washed out by rain or fell out of the sky, most of it got blown away by wind.
"They got very lucky. There were strong storms right before the Olympics," said Liu.
In addition to rain, wind also helped. Beijing is bordered on the south by urban areas and on the north by mountains, so wind blowing north would carry more pollution into the city. Examining the direction of the wind, the researchers saw that it generally blew south in the time period covering the Olympic period.
"The area we looked at is about 50 miles south. This suggests that emission controls need to be on a regional scale rather than just a local scale," said Liu.
The importance of regional controls meshes well with previous research on 2008 Olympics air quality that focused on nitrogen-based pollutants.
Next, the researchers will be examining the effect of pollution on other weather events and climate change in China. Pollutants are very small particles, and some suspect they might be causing fog to form rather than rain due to numerous pollution particles in China, Liu said.
###
DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: http://www.pnnl.gov/news
Thanks to DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
This press release has been viewed 56 time(s).
Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116337/Weather_deserves_medal_for_clean_air_during______Olympics
oregon ducks oregon football lana turner donald glover julio cesar chavez jr jason segel turducken
Yesterday California Attorney General Kamala Harris urged?state legislators to clarify the rules for growing and distributing medical marijuana. In a letter (PDF) to the leaders of the state Assembly and Senate, she notes that California law exempts patients and their primary caregivers from criminal penalties when they "associate...collectively or cooperatively to cultivate marijuana for medical purposes." While "strict constructionists" argue that "any interpretation under which group members are not physically involved in cultivation is too broad," she says, others read this provision "expansively" to allow "large-scale cultivation and transportation of marijuana, memberships in multiple collectives, and the sale of marijuana through dispensaries." Harris says she planned to revise the medical marijuana guidelines?(PDF) that her predecessor, Jerry Brown (now the governor), issued in 2008 but concluded that new legislation was necessary to clarify the law. "Without a substantive change to exiting law," she writes, "these irreconcilable interpretations of the law, and the resulting uncertainty for law enforcement and seriously ill patients, will persist."
I am sad to report that Black Box (which came out in the late 1970s) is currently out of print, but should you encounter it used (at a reasonable price), you?d be a fool not to snap it up, for it is one of the best hide-and-seek games ever made. Where Battleship lets you look for hidden ships one grid-cell at a time, Black Box asks you to deduce the location of hidden ?targets? (plastic balls) from the ways they influence the behavior of ?rays? sent into the box from various positions. The game sets out a universe in which rays can be deflected or reflected by nearby targets or, should a target be directly in the path of an oncoming ray, where a ray you?ve put into the box never comes back out of the box. The goal, depending on whether you?re seeking or hiding, is either to correctly identify the locations of all the hidden targets by using as few rays as possible, or to stump your opponent as to where the targets are hidden.
This is a game for 2-6 players, ages 6 and up, and it came to my attention when a dear friend gave it as a gift to 6-year-old twins that we knew. What was striking was how, after the kids were down for the night, the grown-ups stayed up for hours playing Rat-a-Tat Cat. It?s that kind of game.
