"The coronavirus pandemic is shutting down industrial activity and
temporarily slashing air pollution levels around the world, satellite
imagery from the European Space Agency shows. One expert said the
sudden shift represented the “largest-scale experiment ever,” in terms
of the reduction of industrial emissions...
One of the largest drops in pollution levels could be seen over the city
of Wuhan, in central China, which was put under a strict lockdown in
late January."
"The changes over northern Italy are particularly striking because smoke
from a dense cluster of factories tends to get trapped against the Alps
at the end of the Po Valley, making this one of western Europe’s
pollution hot spots...
“What I think will come out of this is a realization—because we are
forced to—that there is considerable potential to change working
practices and lifestyles."
I am reminded of the days just after 9/11, when I was driving between Toledo, Ohio and Madison, and for several days the sky was strikingly free of contrails.
Folks hiking in the Grand Canyon also noticed the lack of contrails (and the missing drone of the jets) and were very weirded out because they had no word of what was happening.
ReplyDeleteI am addicted to Windwatcher https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-7.58,51.33,1848
ReplyDeleteso I can track the path of storms barrelling in at Ireland from the Atlantic but a pal pointed out that the site also includes PM(2.5) particulates. You can calendar back through the data to show that, when the Australian bushfires were AllTheNews, they were a pimple compared to the normal rash across N China and N India
Today: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/particulates/surface/level/overlay=pm2.5/
Have you seen the amazing pictures of the distant Himalaya mountains, now visible to places in India that have not seen them in 30 years!
ReplyDeleteYes. Hard to believe that something that big would be invisible.
Deletehttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8199955/Himalayas-visible-India-time-30-years-coronavirus-sees-pollution-levels-drop.html