Oregonian article "China's dirty air threatens darker day for Northwest: Research suggests pollution over the Pacific will make Oregon wetter, cooler" by Richard L. Hill:
Severe air pollution from Asia is expanding the winter cloud cover over the north Pacific Ocean and could bring cooler, wetter weather to the Northwest, a new study suggests.
The booming industrial age in China and India has fired up factories, cook stoves, diesel engines and coal plants, sending gritty particles blowing over the Pacific Ocean toward North America. Those particles have expanded clouds in the storm track that sweeps west to east across the Pacific each winter, researchers say. Those changes ultimately could alter weather patterns in the U.S. and even globally.
"The bottom line from our study is that if you change the Pacific storm system, then you're going to change the weather in some places," said Renyi Zhang, a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Texas A&M. "This is definitely going to change the weather system over the United States."
The pollutants sweep into the Northwest with storms and prevailing wind, bringing dust, salt, soot and fine particles of mercury, arsenic, copper, lead and zinc across the Pacific in a few days. The particles can alter the size of the water droplets that form clouds. The larger, deeper clouds that result would reflect more sunlight back into space, cooling the surface, as well as boosting the chance of precipitation, Zhang said.
The researchers looked only at the cloud changes -- mostly brought on by soot and sulfate particles from such activities as coal burning -- not what specific weather changes resulted. "But this is the first study that demonstrates that pollution can change a part of the weather system, which in turn can change the climate," Zhang said....
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