Word: cloudly
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Wayne Kirby's last helicopter mission came on a warm and moonless night in South Texas on June 8, 2008. A few scattered clouds floated 1,200 ft. above the Huntsville International Airport. The sky was clear for miles. But just south of town, a low cloud swept in over Sam Houston National Forest. The fog already had thwarted another helicopter pilot who had tried to fly a patient from Huntsville Memorial Hospital to Houston. Blinded by the fog, that pilot was forced to turn around and abort the mission. Ninety minutes after that, Kirby was asked...
...knew about the first, failed mission. But he couldn't see the cloud, which lingered in a gap between airport weather stations. Kirby decided it was safe to launch. He flew his bright yellow Bell 407 helicopter to the hospital, picked up the patient, and took off for Houston at 2:46 a.m. Two minutes later, Kirby was flying 600 ft. above dense forest at 122 m.p.h., near the spot where the first pilot aborted. Kirby lost radio contact with the hospital in Houston. His helicopter dropped suddenly, to 100 ft. Its rotor sliced into thick pine trees. The cabin...
Pilot John Horwood says the worse part about flying into Hong Kong is the suffocating, two-mile-thick blanket of pollution that hovers between 15 and 18,000 feet. "The whole cockpit fills with an acrid smell," says Horwood, who started noticing the cloud in 1997. "Each year it just gets worse and worse." What comprises this nuisance - a sprawling high-altitude mass of air pollution that stretches from the Arabian peninsula to the western Pacific Ocean - has long captured the curiosity of scientists. A report released in the Jan. 23 issue of Science breathes fresh air into that ongoing...
...rjan Gustafsson, the study's lead author, and his colleagues at Stockholm University conducted research with Indian scientists from January to April 2006 to determine that two-thirds of the cloud's soot particles come from biomass combustion like household cooking and slash-and-burn agriculture. The researchers confirmed that the layer of haze - which many have blamed for the world's increasingly extreme weather patterns - makes rain both more rare during the dry season and more intense during monsoons. And in South Asia, the cloud's net effect on climate change, says the study, rivals that of carbon dioxide...
...silver lining of this massive brown cloud is that a boost in those technologies could decrease soot emissions - fast. "We can't fix every environmental problem, but we can make a huge and immediate change by reducing black carbon," says Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Director of the Center for Clouds, Chemistry & Climate at the University of California at San Diego. (Black carbon manifests as soot particles that comprise brown clouds.) While carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere respond on a sluggish 100-year timescale to reductions in emissions, soot particles, whose effects are equivalent to roughly half the warming damage that carbon...