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Free Picture: The Size of Dust and Smoke
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Description
Desert dust particles tend to be larger in size than aerosols that originate from the processes of combustion. How precisely do the size of the aerosol particles comprising the dust that obscured the Red Sea on July 26, 2005, contrast with the size of the haze particles that obscured the United States eastern seaboard on the same day? NASA's Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR), which views Earth at nine different angles in four wavelengths, provides information about the amount, size, and shape of airborne particles. Here, MISR aerosol amount and size is presented for these two events. These MISR results distinguish desert dust, the most common non-spherical aerosol type, from pollution and forest fire particles. Determining aerosol characteristics is a key to understanding how aerosol particles influence the size, abundance, and rate of production of cloud droplets, and to a better understanding of how aerosols influence clouds and climate. The left panel of each of these two image sets (Red Sea, left; U.S. coastline, right) is a natural-color view from MISR's 70-degree forward viewing camera. The color-coded maps in the central panels show aerosol optical depth; the right panels provide a measure of aerosol size, expressed as the "Angstrom exponent." For the optical depth maps, yellow pixels indicate the most optically-thick aerosols, whereas the red, green and blue pixels represent progressively decreasing aerosol amounts. For this dramatic dust storm over the Red Sea, the aerosol is quite thick, and in some places, the dust over water is too optically thick for MISR to retrieve the aerosol amount. For the eastern seaboard haze, the thickest aerosols have accumulated over the Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. Cases where no successful retrieval occurred, either due to extremely high aerosol optical thickness or to clouds, appear as dark gray pixels. For the Angstrom exponent maps, the blue and green pixels (smaller values) corr
Keywords
desert dust, dust, earth science, environment, environmental, jpl, nasa, desert dust particles, free photography, free photo, free photos, free picture, free pictures, free image, free images
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