April 10, 2009
International: A look at Europe finds haze in its eastern region
All is pretty quiet in terms of air pollution in southeast and south Asia this week. It seemed pretty hazy in Kuala Lumpur this morning, but apparently the air quality was pretty good. So, since I will be on business travel to Europe at the end of April, I thought I would check on conditions there. MODIS Rapid Response's new format and connected subsets make it easy to review large areas. Turns out that while western Europe looks very clear, eastern Europe has quite a pall of haze that extends over the Mediterranean. Looking back in time, this has been a multi-day event.
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Fortunately, it looks like spring has arrived and I won't have to try and find any warm clothes!
Posted by Jill Engel-Cox at April 10, 2009 10:55 PMAnd another little trick that I've found quite useful is to import the .kmz's into Google Earth and let GE do the compositing for you. It also overlays the geography. Rapidfire has .kmz output on each subset.
We should look at the ICARE site at U. Lille to see if the European ground data is available in .kmz format. There are significant ESA data sets available through ICARE although few were available on the same day of measurement.
Posted by: Ray Hoff at April 11, 2009 5:20 AMI don't like the results from GoogleEarth sometimes since you lose so much resolution. Last I checked, Europe doesn't have a single realtime air quality dataset, although you can get specific countries.
Posted by: Jill at April 11, 2009 8:01 AM