Earth Science Gallery

2003 EARTH SCIENCE VIDEOTAPES

Tape Title	Record ID	Date Produced	TRT:	Synopsis
LIGHTNING HAS A SURPRISING EFFECT ON POLLUTION	G03-023	03/19/03	00:02:35	Surprising results show scientists that summertime lightning over the United States increases regional pollution 3 to 8 miles above Earth's surface by significant amounts. The lightning-created pollution surpasses those by human activities higher in the atmosphere, in contrast to the larger amounts of manmade urban air pollutants at low levels of the atmosphere. The finding, by a group lead by Renyi Zhang of Texas A&M University, is based on combined data from the ground-based National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN), the NASA satellite Optical Transient Detector (OTD) to obtain the number of lightning flashes over the U.S. and airborne platforms that are part of NASA's Global Tropospheric Experiment (GTE), such as the Atmospheric Boundary Layer Experiments (ABLE3), and the Chemical Instrumentation Test and Evaluation (CITE2). The finding suggests that pollution may lead to more lightning, which leads to more pollution and that during the summertime, a higher frequency of lightning opens the door for the development of more smog in the free troposphere.
TAPE CONTENTS:
ITEM (1): Optical Transient Detector Data Example - The Optical Transient Detector (OTD), aboard the Microlab satellite, is the world's first space-based sensor capable of detecting and locating lightning events in the daytime as well as during the nighttime with high detection efficiency. It was designed and built at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. *Courtesy: NASA*
ITEM (2): Lightning B-Roll - Various scenes of ground-based lightning *Courtesy: NASA*

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