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UAVs Will Study Californian Smog
Roland Piquepaille writes "The California Energy Commission is funding a research effort named CAPPS, short for California AUAV Air Pollution Profiling Study. CAPPS will use autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs) to gather meteorological data as the aircraft fly through clouds over Southern California. The goal is to study smog and its consequences as well as better understand the sources of air pollution. The first flights started in April 2008 and data collection will continue until January 2009. But read more for additional references and photos of these autonomous unmanned aircraft."
The goal is to study smog and its consequences as well as better understand the sources of air pollution.
Airplanes?
Although I must say, the nested acronyms just about blew my mind.
Are UAVs better for this job then conventional manned aircraft?
UAVs make sense where the flight is into harms way, but this?
"The goal is to study smog and its consequences as well as better understand the sources of air pollution"
<tinfoilhat>
Oh, that's what they say... But let's just see if they don't get used for citizen surveillance as well... If they're already flying there, you know someone in power will ask for it.
</tinfoilhat>
more crazies seeing UFOs
...So why not study the air pollution in a place where there's more of it?
You have plenty of options.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Our UAV is online!
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Good ol' slashdot, always first with the scoop! What month is it again?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Pay no attention to the government aircraft constantly above your heads. They are only there to study smog.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
You must not live in LA. Yes, most days are ok here (at least a vast improvement over the 70s), but there are still days you can see a visible brown haze. Improvements have been made but the problem is definitely not "solved".
UAVs Will Study Californians.
For more, see my post here.
IANAM(Meteorologist), but why do they need UAVs? Couldn't they just rig up a series of regular weather balloons?
Big Brother gets it's foot, er wings, in the door yet again with a plausible reason which moves towards totalitarianism. I can't believe that you American's keep falling for that over and over and over again. The next thing you know all your home electronics such as butt plugs will have cameras, microphones, tracking devices along with dna sampling redundantly built in along with mesh wifi to report the data to their google powered data warehouses for full 7x24x366xLifeTime information awareness about you and everyone you ever connect with along with all the content of your conversations. Good luck with that.
That's good, so they can mount the sensors ahead of the engine. Otherwise they might collect data on their own emissions rather than what they are flying thru.
Infuriate left and right
I think you are missing the point of the research, which is geared to understanding how pollution moves around the globe, and how far-flung its effects can be.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
You may notice they are studying air pollution in California where it is a problem? That other cities in the US have "clean" air is a happy circumstance of their location. California has the some of the strictest emissions standards of anywhere in the US, but because of quirks of local geography and weather, some of the worst air pollution. The other US cities aren't for the most part any cleaner, they just don't have as many people and the wind tends to blow the pollution downstream so it can be Somebody Else's Problem.
After 5 years, and $10 million dollars invested on advanced UAV research, it has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that the smog levels in LA are.... Really Bad.
Eschew Obfuscation
Will they be packing Hellfire missiles to deal with "gross polluters"?
Los Angeles has it good compared to the entire San Joaquin Valley, Fresno in particular.
Walking out of the house at 5:30 in the morning (exercise to beat the heat), one notices that the air smells like someone just lit a firecracker. During the day, the haze is orange-brown and often so dense there is no visibility after half a mile.
The air is so bad, one asthmatic friend of mine who teaches at Fresno State had to move to Santa Cruz. He now commutes twice a week (2.5 hours one way). After his bike rides he'd come home and start hacking blood, the air was that bad.
I'm glad I was only visiting, but Fresno, Los Banos, and all of the infernal SJV has it bad.
Smog is a serious problem. (Not all of it is caused by internal combustion engines. A lot of it also comes from crop dusting the thousands of acres of fertile California Valley soil.)
blog
This is not for researching pollution!
They are secretly equipped with spy gadgets to watch everyone!
They even have Hellfire missles to secretly bomb coal fired electric plants!
== I won't tell you my tin foil hat size, because that's a secret. ==
...t fly into an LA area airport on many days, and your will actually descend through a yellowish-brown layer... The actual number of days in "many days" is in the 20-30 range now. That's down from 200+ days in the past.I live in the Inland Empire which gets the smog from LA. Lately, I've been in the habit of taking a morning walk at a park in the foothills of the mountain range that forms a northern border of the greater LA area. That puts me at about the same elevation as the smog layer.
About half the time there's too much haze (white fogginess) to see the smog layer. On days without haze, the smog layer (brown fogginess) is usually visible. Some days it's hard to ignore, other days you have to look for it - but it's rare for it to be gone completely (maybe on Sundays or holidays).
Also, the uncovered porch where I live develops a substantial layer of tarry black particulate matter matter after even just a day or so. I assume that's soot from vehicle exhaust but I haven't done a detailed analysis.
Anyway, I'm hoping to move out of the Inland Empire and (lack of) air quality is one of my top three reasons for moving.
Southern Ca also has the San Bernardino mountains, you could just as easily drive up at various elevations and take samples.. but again, I don't think there is going to be anything learned we don't already know. Another thing to consider is this.. Where are most people breathing ? I think samples at the level where it's used would be the most important.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Succeeded? I don't think so. The sky is brown. The sky is not supposed to be brown. Maybe you have gotten used to it gradually, and you think it is okay. It is not. The smog in LA is awful, I'm changing jobs to get out of it.
http://www.epa.gov/air/oaqps/greenbook/mapo3n.html
and here's one for the 8-hour criterion:
http://www.epa.gov/air/oaqps/greenbook/map8hrnm.html
California suffers from the double whammy of having large cities, plus a range of mountains that traps large masses of air in the valleys where the pollutants build up, but you can see that any largely populated area can have problems with ozone. Because the density of population is much higher in these non-attainment areas, a large portion of the population is affected.
They are just getting you accustomed to the sight of it abouve you all the time.
Today the payload tray is for "pollution", tomorrow its for you.
Same with cameras and microphones.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The report is a hack research paper designed to support a political view, not an serious attempt to understand pollution and how it affects people. It is not science. It is propaganda masquerading as science. Your misunderstanding of pollution is large. Your misunderstanding of health matters is dangerous.
* Weakness in this "report" include:
- It fails to include all data; there are about 100 counties in North Carolina; the report summarizes hospitalization in only 29.
- It aggregates ozone and hospitalization rates for 2 years, rather than correlate daily/weekly patterns of ozone and hospitalization.
- It fails to account for other contributors to asthma (pets, pollen, mold, infection, cigarette smoke, etc)
- It fails to address adult asthma.
- It fails to account for:
a) asthma in children over 14
b) asthma in children which was not severe enough to cause hospitalization
- The graph shows only one county seriously out of line with the average hospitalization rate; Swain county. Swain county is:
a) small enough to yield statistically questionable data
b) lower than the rest of the state in income and education, and
c) higher than the rest of the state in poverty.
If anything, it seems to indicate a correlation between poverty and illness. Hardly a surprise.
- Schwartz's underlying asthma data comes from a report done on children on Medicaid and asthma-related hospitalizations. The original report made no mention of ozone or pollution. The original report also gives the following caveats, which Schwartz made no mention of
"Neither source will produce a reliable indication of the total prevalence of asthma among children."
"Other children on Medicaid with asthma may not have been diagnosed, or may not have had services paid for by Medicaid during the year."
"The hospital discharge data counts only those cases where the complications of asthma were serious enough to warrant one of more overnight hospital stays."
** The tip of this information iceberg can be found:
here
here
here
here
here
or here
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
They keep making the standards harder and harder to meet as the air gets cleaner. The purpose is to make sure enough areas continue to fail.
That way, the EPA still needs more funding even if the air is clean.
By moving the goalposts, they ensure their efforts are always "needed".
If the standards had not changed, almost every one of these places would pass easily.