January 17, 2009
International: Clear day in KL, haze in Thailand
We went out this morning to do some shopping at a local outdoor market and I was so excited that it was completely clear here in Kuala Lumpur, with not a cloud in the sky. This is technically the rainy season, so we usually have quite a bit of cloud cover if not always rain. I had wanted a clear-day satellite image for some presentations, as well as for the Blog, so it looked promising today. Since it was about the time of the MODIS Terra overpass, we did get a pretty clear image of the peninsula, at least over the west coast (map at the bottom right if you need a geography refresher--I didn't want to GoogleEarth these since that loses so much resolution).
However, as I was studying the image tonight, I found several features of interest to those of us who care about air quality. First, in Indonesia across the Malacca Strait from KL, you can see several large smoke plumes, blowing away from Malaysia. You can see them even more in the afternoon Aqua image. Indonesia has significant problems with biomass burning which can result in terrible air quality for the region, although it is much more common in the summer. These look like big fires but not a major air quality event for the region.
Second, to the north of Malaysia is Thailand and it had a distinctly hazy look in the above image. In trying to understand the source, I looked at the MODIS image further north which covers Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). In the below MODIS Aqua image (left), there is quite a bit of smoke in both countries presumably from biomass burning as well. You can keep tracing this north and west into Bangladesh and northern India, which are covered in smoke and urban haze. The regional haze and wind map (right) from the Singapore National Environmental Agency shows wind flow from the north. Although they indicate a few ‘hot spots’ in Cambodia there is no significant haze there.
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I am still learning about the air pollution sources and weather patterns here on a peninsula in the tropics, which is really different from the east coast of continental North America! I hope to have it partially figured out by the time the rainy season ends in March and April...
Posted by Jill Engel-Cox at January 17, 2009 12:20 PM