Oct 5 1999
From The Space Library
Analyzing data from NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) spacecraft, researchers proved for the first time that smoke from forest fires inhibits rainfall. TRMM, a mission of the United States and Japan and part of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, had been producing continuous data since December 1997. Daniel Rosenfeld of the Institute of Earth Sciences at Hebrew University in Jerusalem had studied the data, finding that clouds polluted with heavy smoke significantly inhibit warm rain processes. When smoke pollutes them, cloud tops must "grow considerably above the freezing level" to produce rain through a different process. Rosenfeld remarked that the results of his research had validated earlier studies, which showed that urban air pollution inhibits rainfall. Christian D. Kummerow, a TRMM scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) commented that such findings were "making the first inroads into the difficult problem of understanding humanity's impacts on global precipitation."
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