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| Monday, August 23 | | · | Energy Hogbusters For Kids - Battle of the Bulb |
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| Blackout and Blue Skies - What the Haze is Going On? |
 In a recent study by researchers at the University of Maryland ("The 2003 North American Electrical Blackout: An Accidental Experiment in Atmospheric Chemistry") a surprising outcome of the blackout was that skies were dramatically bluer and the air was much healthier on the east coast than scientific models had expected.
Atmospheric measurements taken by the scientists some 24 hours after many power plants had essentially shut down found a 90 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide, a gas that leads to haze and acid rain, and a 50 percent reduction in smog, or ground-level ozone. The Maryland scientists also found that the amount of light scattering particles in the air dropped by 70 percent and visibility increased by some 20 miles.
"What surprised us was not so much the observation of improved air quality during the blackout, but the magnitude of the observed improvement," says research scientist and lead author Lackson Marufu. "The improvement in air quality was so great that you could not only measure it, but could actually see it as a much clearer less hazy sky."
According to the study, observed emission reductions exceeded what experts might have expected from existing data on the contribution of power plants to air pollution. The dramatic improvement in air quality during the blackout may result from underestimation of emissions from power plants, inaccurate representation of power plant effluent in emission models or unaccounted for atmospheric chemical reaction(s). These unique observations will provide a resource for determining whether air quality models can accurately reproduce the contributions of specific pollution sources to regional air quality, the study says.
 I guess we will just have to wait and see how future scientific models incorporate the unexpected data from the Maryland study but it seems that even well-crafted, scientific models can sometimes become a little hazy.
For the science minded, we found a PDF version of the study at:
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~russ/BlackoutFinal.pdf
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Average Score: 5
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