U.S. Air Quality

International: Notes on southeast Asia air quality

Regular readers of the Smog Blog know that I moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia middle of last year. At that time, I transitioned from my regular post schedule here, planning to focus on international air quality. To kick off that coverage, we made a series of posts about air quality in China during the Olympics; but I have not been doing much posting this fall for a variety of reasons. Part of the challenge is the high level of detailed quality posts we make on the Smog Blog nowadays, facilitated by better and more diverse real-time image sites available and, of course, a fantastic set of dedicated bloggers. Internationally, sites are much more limited and the world much bigger.

Here we are in the new year of 2009 and I'd like to get more familiar with the geography, available air quality sites, and air quality climatology of Asia, with a focus on SE Asia. So to not get bogged down, I thought I would go back to our style of blogging from 4-5 years ago--shorter regular posts that seek to make incremental discoveries--at least in the beginning.

I have compiled just a few websites that I will be using. Here they are without much commentary but as I discover which are most useful, I plan to say more about them.

• Regional Haze Map of SE Asia: I think what they call haze here is primarily smoke from biomass burning, a major issue in the dry season, but not so much now.
• Air pollutant levels in SE Asia: Malaysia ; Singapore ; and Thailand.
• Rapidfire MODIS subset: The folks at the Rapidfire site created this subset of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore just for us--thank you!
• Satellite Imagery of SE Asia: This link is for Malaysia but there are links for other regions at the site as well. The imagery is weather focused.
• Real-time regional weather: Temperatures and wind barbs.

If you know of a site that I missed, leave a comment with the link. I'd love to learn about where to get more information.

And since I cannot post without including at least one satellite image, here is Malaysia today processed via GoogleEarth so you can see the borders and cities (here is the full-sized image for better clarity). Air quality was good throughout the region. It is the rainy season, especially on the east coast, but the rain here on the west side of peninsular Malaysia is very localized and we had no rain here today.

Posted by Jill Engel-Cox at January 4, 2009 10:21 AM | TrackBack