Some of the world’s most sophisticated equipment for measuring air pollution and greenhouse gases is currently flying around the Earth, capturing a snapshot of the global atmosphere. Researchers are trying to better understand what’s out there, and how it moves around the planet.
From the outside, this DC-8 looks a lot like any other jumbo jet.
But inside, "you’d never find all this together anywhere else but this aircraft," said Tom Ryerson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as he walked down the aisle of this flying laboratory. Most of the seats have been pulled out. Tubes suck the air from outside and feed sophisticated devices for measuring pollution.
"So they’re measuring single particles, these are micron size and smaller, a million times smaller than a meter in diameter, one particle at a time, all the way around the world," Ryerson said.
Harvard University research associate Roisin Commane is one of about 40 scientists and crew on this NASA project.
"At the moment, we’re a fair few hundred miles to the west of California. We’re headed north, crossing over the state of Alaska," she said from her seat in the plane. They circle the globe for five weeks at a time. This the second of four trips in all.
"I’m looking at the graph here in front of me and the CO2 has increased a little, the methane is a little up," she said. "So this air has come from somewhere. You don’t get CO2 or methane coming from the ocean."
Every half an hour or so, the plane drops from about 40,000 feet to just 500 feet over the ocean.
At one point, they got a rare opportunity to get a kind of measurement nobody’s ever gotten before. On the edge of a storm, they aim for a phenomenon called the warm conveyor belt that moves air and pollution up to the troposphere.
"And we did it!" said Steven Wofsy of Harvard, the principle investigator of the mission. "You could detect all kinds of signatures of Asian industrial pollution — carbon monoxide, sulfuric acid, sulfate, all kinds of gunk."
Computer models show this pollution drifted here from Asia, but only by actually coming here and taking measurements can scientists understand which chemicals are here, and how they’re interacting with each other to impact the atmosphere and the climate — even in the cleanest areas.
"Once it leaves the general area where it’s been emitted, we tend to think that it’s gone. The solution to pollution is dilution," Wofsy said. "But it goes somewhere."
And Wofsy said the atmosphere in remote areas like here in Alaska is more sensitive to a small amount of pollution. The plane crossed the snow-covered mountains and reached the Arctic Ocean, where Wofsy looked out the window in shock.
"There’s open water out there, and the ice is hardly..." he said over the plane's headset system.
"And the bit that is there looks awfully thin," Commane responded. "Most of it’s translucent."
"I really don’t think that’s what it’s supposed to look like," Wofsy said.
Under a new president who’s called climate change a "hoax," many of the scientists on the plane who work for federal agencies didn't want to talk about what kind of future their research has. But Wofsy takes the long view.
"Funding goes up and down, priorities of the administration or NASA go up and down," he said. "The problems that we’re talking about, the scientific problems and their feedback on society are here to stay."
The flying lab landed in Anchorage and the scientists piled off, gripping laptops full of fresh data. Data that, Wofsy said, confirms we all share one atmosphere.
