Dust from China alters California climate, satellites show some days one third of air over LA and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia

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7/20/2007, "Huge Dust Plumes From China Cause Changes in Climate," Robert Lee Hotz, Wall St. Journal
 

"Courtesy SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE
 

A satellite view from 2001 shows dust arriving in California from Asian deserts. Concentrations of dust are visible to the south, near the coastline (lower right); To the west the dust is mixed with clouds over open ocean. This dust event caused a persistent haze in places like Death Valley, California, where skies are usually crystal clear." image via Wall St. Journal

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"Courtesy SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE.

A satellite image from 2005 shows a plume of dust flowing from China to the north of the Korean Peninsula and over the Sea of Japan. Such plumes can cross the Pacific and scatter dust across the Western U.S."

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7/20/2007, "Huge Dust Plumes From China Cause Changes in Climate," Robert Lee Hotz, Wall St. Journal

"One tainted export from China can't be avoided in North America -- air. An outpouring of dust layered with man-made sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit and nitrates is crossing the Pacific Ocean on prevailing winds from booming Asian economies in plumes so vast they alter the climate. These rivers of polluted air can be wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon. 
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"There are times when it covers the entire Pacific Ocean basin like a ribbon bent back and forth," said atmospheric physicist V. Ramanathan at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

On some days, almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia. With it comes up to three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches the West Coast, Dr. Ramanathan and his colleagues recently reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research."...

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2011 crashed satellite was to study aerosols:

“Perhaps that’s why the loss hurts most, because Glory “was directed very specifically at the place where our knowledge was weakest“, he said.”…”A tragedy for climate science.”…”an area that desperately needs more study.”…

3/4/11, “Raze of Glory: NASA Earth-Observing Climate Satellite Fails to Reach Orbit,” Scientific American, John Matson
 

“A launch malfunction sent the Glory satellite crashing into the ocean, almost exactly mimicking the 2009 loss of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory.“…

 

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