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 Dave Thurlow, Host |
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. Something is blocking the view in many of our wilderness areas. The culprit is not smog, humidity, fog or dust. It's haze.
Most people think that the haze that they see is humidity, but we know from our research that it's actually small particles of sulfur in the air."
That's Bruce Hill, the senior staff scientist for the Appalachian Mountain Club in Gorham, NH. For ten years he's been collecting and analyzing tiny particles in the air that make haze.
"We put out some particle monitors, some of the first in the northeast and what we found out was that every time the sulfur particles and the very small particles called aerosols when they started to go up, the visibility started to go down. So, in essence as you put more stuff in the atmosphere it gets hazier and that's not rocket science."
Bruce showed me how dramatic the effects of haze can be on visibility:
"I'm going to show you an image here on my computer that I'm generating using a computer model that shows what haze looks like under different air pollution conditions."
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He brings up two pictures of the the same vista in the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee.
"The visibility to the right where it's hazy happens 10 to 25 percent of the time and as you can see, all the colors disappeared, the contrast, there's no clarity, you can barely see the ridgeline.
It reminded me of the haziest days here on Mount Washington. On the left side, a typical looking Smokey Mountain afternoon, with some natural humidity but no haze, no sulfer particles to block the wonderful view.
Tomorrow, we'll hear what's being done to clear up the haze around the country. And for more information on this topic, be sure to visit our website at mountwashington.org. Thanks to Subaru and the National Science Foundation.