Atmospheric haze regional

Atmospheric haze can occur over regions of several thousand square kUometers, caused by the oxidation of widespread SO2 and NO2 to sulfate and nitrate in relatively slow-moving air masses. In the eastern United States, large air masses associated with slow- moving or stagnating anticyclones have become sufficiently contaminated to be called hazy blobs. These blobs have been tracked by satellites as they develop and move across the country (15). 

Atmospheric chemistry in the Arctic has been the subject of studies for many years, in part because of the observation of Arctic haze decades ago. This haze is composed of particles with significant amounts of sulfate, about half of which is due to long-range transport from other regions, particularly Eurasia during the winter (e.g., Barrie and Bottenheim, 1991 Polissar et al., 1998a, 1998b). 

Radoejvic M. and Tan K. S., 2000. Impacts of biomass burning and regional haze on the pH of rainwater in Brunei Darussalam. Atmospheric Environment, 34, 2739-2744. 

Spatial scales characteristic of various atmospheric chemical phenomena are given in Table 1.1. Many of the phenomena in Table 1.1 overlap for example, there is more or less of a continuum between (1) urban and regional air pollution, (2) the aerosol haze associated with regional air pollution and aerosol-climate interactions, (3) greenhouse gas increases and stratospheric ozone depletion, and (4) tropospheric oxidative capacity and stratospheric ozone depletion. The lifetime of a species is the average time that a molecule of that species resides in the atmosphere before removal (chemical transformation to another species counts as removal). Atmospheric lifetimes vary from less than a second for... 

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