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| News & Events > Distinguished Lecture Series |
Asian Brown CloudV. RamanathanVictor P. Alderson Professor of Ocean Sciences The most visible impact of air pollution is the haze, a layer of pollutants and particles from biomass burning and industrial emissions. This cloud of pollution at times has a brownish color (e.g, the Denver Brown Cloud ) and this brown cloud phenomenon is a common feature of industrial and rural regions around the world. Due to long range transport, the mostly urban (fossil fuel related) or rural (biomass burning related) phenomenon is transformed into a regional haze (or cloud) that can span an entire continent. e.g, the Asian Brown Cloud or even an entire ocean basin. It is now becoming clear that the brown cloud can have large impacts on Agriculture, health, climate and the water budget of the planet. My talk will describe the discovery of the Asian Brown Cloud during the INDOEX experiment and subsequent modeling studies that link this cloud with disruption of regional climate including the monsoon, El-Nino amongst other impacts. The implication of the results thus far is that manmade particulates may be drying the planet. About the LecturerRamanathan is an expert on atmospheric and Climate sciences, whose research focuses on global climate dynamics, solar radiation transfer, the greenhouse effect, clouds, aerosols and satellite remote sensing. Ramanathan is widely recognized by the scientific community for his work on the greenhouse effect of numerous anthropogenic traces gases in the atmosphere. He was the first to demonstrate that CFCs are major greenhouse gases and significant contributors to global warming. On a per molecule basis, the CFCs were about 10000 times more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. In the 1980s he led an WMO sponsored international study that established the field of chemistry-climate interactions. He followed this work with a focus on clouds, the Gordion knot of the climate problem. Using a satellite radiation budget experiment, he demonstrated with collaborators at NASA, that clouds had a global radiative cooling effect . To understand how aerosols are modifying global warming, he designed and served as co-chief scientist for the $25M Indian Ocean Experiment, which led to the discovery of the South Asian Brown haze and its surprisingly large impact on the solar heating of the region. This work established the strong link between air pollution and climate, and led to the Asian Brown Cloud project, sponsored by the United Nations. He is now designing an experiment involving unmanned aircraft and miniature instruments to understand how the planet regulates its albedo. He has won numerous national and international awards including: Election to the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Europea; The Buys Ballot Medal for the most outstanding research for the decade of the 1990s by the Royal Dutch national Academy of Sciences, The 2002 Rossby Medal, the highest honor given by the American Meteorological Society and the 1997 Volvo Environment prize. More Information |
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