NASA helps University of Birmingham scientists scale new heights
SCIENTISTS from the University of Birmingham are taking part in a new study with NASA counterparts assessing climate change and air pollution.
The scientists are part of a group of UK universities taking part in a collaboration which involves the use of an unmanned robotic aircraft to gather high altitude atmospheric data.
One of projects being run by NASA, the Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment (ATTREX), has a sister campaign which is just starting in the UK – the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) CAST project: Coordinated Airborne Studies in the Tropics.
The aircraft, a NASA Global Hawk, originally developed for military missions, will explore the tropical tropopause layer, the region where the Earth’s air enters the stratosphere. This region is where pollutants and greenhouse gases are transported into and out of the atmosphere and can potentially influence our climate.
The scientists will be studying these chemical and climate interactions, and will aim to discover how much of the gas moves up into storms, something scientists know little about at present.
The science teams will programme the Global Hawk to fly into the most climate-sensitive and difficult to reach regions close to the equator, at an altitude of around 65,600 feet above the Earth – around twice the height of a commercial passenger jet.
UK lead scientist Dr Neil Harris, from the University of Cambridge, said: “We are the first UK group to work with NASA using the Global Hawk as a science platform. The project will be very efficient in terms of sharing equipment, expertise and data, and we expect the results to answer some fundamental questions about how the movement of atmospheric pollutants can influence the Earth’s climate.”
The Birmingham team will provide a model to simulate the behaviour of very high, very cold, almost invisible clouds which are important in moderating the amount of water entering the ozone layer, which, in turn, is important because water in the stratosphere can destroy the protective ozone shield.
The new drone aircraft provides new ways of probing the air as it moves towards the ozone layer. Jointly with Lancaster University the researchers are also developing software to convert the drone’s data stream into information for scientific decision-making in real-time, using novel pattern recognition techniques that do not need to ‘see’ the whole data set before starting to extract patterns.
Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Birmingham, Rob MacKenzie, said: “The Earth’s water cycle is familiar to every schoolchild, but it still contains many puzzles. The CAST project will provide a unique insight into how water enters the ozone layer and so will help us predict how that protective layer will behave in a warmer-and-wetter future.”
