NASA Mission Helps Taiwan Map Air Pollution

A NASA plane is sampling air across Taiwan--and other nearby countries--helping to fight pollution throughout the region.

Transcript

00:00 All systems go.

00:03 NASA has sent this DC-8 aircraft to East Asia to study where the region's air pollution

00:08 comes from and how to make the air in this part of the world better.

00:12 Today's mission, Taiwan.

00:15 The crew has spent the day flying zigzags across the island, taking samples at different

00:19 altitudes, comparing the fresh air of Taiwan's sparsely populated east coast with the often

00:24 smoggy skies of the industrial west coast.

00:28 It's the first of what the team hopes will be several flights over Taiwan, testing the

00:31 air on different days in different weather, all as the project moves between the Philippines,

00:36 South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand.

00:39 Taiwan has a very advanced air quality, atmospheric chemistry community, but what they don't have

00:49 is a flying laboratory.

00:52 The DC-8 is a unique thing.

00:54 It's the largest flying laboratory in the world and so we have strong connections with

00:59 the scientists in Taiwan and so they invited us to collaborate with them and we said we'd

01:07 already picked our four cities but they suggested that perhaps we just overfly them a few times

01:15 and we said we'd love to try and do that.

01:17 One of the focuses of this flyover was the Kaohsiung-Pingtung area in the south of the

01:21 country.

01:22 This area has some of Taiwan's worst air quality.

01:25 The government has its own program to study the issue, but the NASA data is helping them

01:29 to form a 3D map of what pollutants are where, and whether they come from primary human sources

01:35 like cars or form later from chemical reactions in the atmosphere.

01:40 The local scientists helped us design our flight pattern.

01:44 They have two projects going on right now and so we, this is why we're studying the

01:50 southern half of the island.

01:51 They said we have two field campaigns going on.

01:55 If you fly at these altitudes, at these locations, you'll be sampling directly upwind from where

01:59 we're monitoring.

02:01 Onboard labs have fast-working, high-tech equipment that is already giving the scientists

02:05 some interesting data.

02:07 So based on just this one day of data, we can clearly see that Taiwan is closer to Seoul

02:13 chemically than it is to Manila as far as the type of pollution we found.

02:18 This kind of comparison is helping build a pollution map of the whole region.

02:23 Many Asian cities suffer from poor air quality, but while emissions in each may be a problem,

02:28 it looks like pollution may also move around, crossing borders and even open sea.

02:33 Finding out where it's coming from is what this mission is all about.

02:37 Justin Wu and John Van Triest for Taiwan Plus.

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