A slice of atmosphere, pole-to-pole

by John D. Cox | January 30, 2009

Some people have all the fun.  Researchers from Harvard, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and colleagues elsewhere just completed a flight from the Arctic to Antarctica in a specially instrumented aircraft that gave them a molecule's view of all of the stuff in the atmosphere.  The Gulfstream V research jet sucks in air along the way and on-board instruments analyze its contents on the fly, giving scientists the first detailed chemical "snapshot" of its kind.  

"What we’re observing is really fantastic to look at," NCAR scientist Britton Stephens told journalists Thursday (he also speaks in the video below, to the right).   "We see carbon dioxide and other pollutants piling up in the Arctic.  This is a result of industrial emissions over much of the Northern Hemisphere as well as the exhaling of the terrestrial biosphere which took up carbon dioxide last summer and is now releasing it in the winter.  Similarly, as we flew south over the Southern Ocean we observed a piling up of oxygen near the surface.  It tells us a lot about what the ocean biology is  doing and how that’s also affecting carbon cycling in that region." (Above photo, courtesy of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, is taken from the plane over the Arctic.)

The first of five missions through 2011, the flight took them from Colorado to Alaska and the Arctic Circle, south to New Zealand and Antarctica. "We'd really like to learn more about the budgets of greenhouse gases and black carbon particles," said Steve Wofsy of Harvard (that's Wofsy in the video below).  "By budgets we mean the sources and sinks of these materials on the surface of the Earth, how they get into the atmosphere, how they get move around by the atmosphere and how they get removed."  The findings could have exceedingly practical implications.  "If people are going to make treaties that ban or restrain the use of these materials, those treaties

have to based on sound scientific knowledge of where they

come from and where they go.  And this slice of the atmosphere is really going to help us understand that."

- John D. Cox