The pollution layer over the Salt Lake Valley remains today (Saturday) but clearly shallowed over the past few days.
The photo below was taken at 0743 MST Tuesday.
You can compare that with the one below taken at 0745 this morning.
So, some temporary relief in some upper-bench areas.
On the valley floor, there was also some improvement, with PM2.5 this morning at Rose Park being lower than it has been in a few days.
All of this is evidence of top-down mixing with the pollution being mixed out from the top down. Sadly, it has not all been removed on the valley floor.
What remains after today we will probably be stuck with again for a while.
What causes the daily peaks? That almost looks like a plot of temp rather than PM.
ReplyDeleteHard to explain in a sentence or two but it has to do with the mixing of particulate matter that forms above the surface at night and in the early morning. This mixing happens with surface heating.
DeletePaper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.6b06603
Is the drop yesterday and today due in part to the fact that it's a weekend (fewer contributors)?
ReplyDeleteIt's mainly due to cooling aloft, which allowed for more mixing.
ReplyDeleteHey Jim - totally random, but I would love to see you analyze all these "photos" coming out of Kamchatka with their recent snowstorm, where the snow has drifted over an 8-story apartment complex. IMO, seems like there's a lot of AI photos running rampant on the internet. In fact, I saw the Weather Channel post a video of kids sledding off the apartment's 8-10 story roof! I'll gladly eat my words if I'm wrong here, but I'd love an expert like yourself to dissect some of the imagery there and tell us if you think it's real or AI generated.
ReplyDeleteI saw one that was clearly fake. Whether it was the same you saw I do not know. Impossible for me to assess the fidelity of all of the photos. I think one needs to be very careful with anything one sees on the Internet (and even the experts can sometimes be burned).
DeleteI don't know a lot about Kamchatka, but farther to the south, the Sakalin and Kuril islands have had many avalanche disasters. They can get substantial snows. See https://doi.org/10.3189/2014JoG13J143.
Thanks for answering my question! Love that you actually get back to people in the comments here. Much appreciated.
DeleteJim. Looking forward to your next blogpost and hopefully some good news that we will see snow soon 🙏
ReplyDeleteThere's no good news anymore. My advice is to sell sell sell before the Greatest Snow on Earth turns into a penny stock.
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