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Air pollution
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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  is the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials that cause harm
or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or damages the natural environment, into
the atmosphere.

The atmosphere is a complex, dynamic natural gaseous system that is essential to support life on
planet Earth. Stratospheric ozone depletion due to air pollution has long been recognized as a threat to
human health as well as to the Earth's ecosystems.

An air pollutant is known as a substance in the air that can cause harm to humans and the environment.
Pollutants can be in the form of solid particles, liquid droplets, or gases. In addition, they may be natural
or man-made.[1]

Pollutants can be classified as either primary or secondary. Usually, primary pollutants are substances
directly emitted from a process, such as ash from a volcanic eruption, the carbon monoxide gas from a
motor vehicle exhaust or sulfur dioxide released from factories.

Secondary pollutants are not emitted directly. Rather, they form in the air when primary pollutants react or
interact. An important example of a secondary pollutant is ground level ozone ² one of the many
secondary pollutants that make up photochemical smog.

Note that some pollutants may be both primary and secondary: that is, they are both emitted directly and
formed from other primary pollutants.

About 4 percent of deaths in the United States can be attributed to air pollution, according to the
Environmental Science Engineering Program at the Harvard School of Public Health.
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Air Pollution Linked to Low IQ in Children-journal
Friday, July 24, 2009 by: Kim Evans, citizen journalist

When many doctors downplay the role of toxicity in the body and underestimate the damage it causes, it's nice to see
research pointing to these effects. Researchers recently found that mothers who breathe in more polluted air during
their pregnancy were more apt to have children with lower IQs.

Two hundred and forty nine children were studied and the IQ difference between the high pollution group and the low
pollution group was about four to five points. Four to five points doesn't sound like much, but when you understand
that only thirty points marks the difference between genius and average, you can understand the significance.

Patrick Breysse, an environmental health specialist at Johns Hopkins' school of public health, thinks that air quality
might be part of the reason that wealthier children tend to do better in school than children from poorer
neighborhoods, as poorer families tend to live in more polluted areas.

It's interesting though that only air pollution was accounted for in this study. It'd be curious to see the results if they
accounted for things like: eating organic, natural foodsverses pesticide-laced, processed foods or like drinking
nutrient-rich fruit and vegetable juices instead of coffee or coke. While few are immune from such habits, the latter
are also more likely to be consumed regularly in low income areas.

The larger picture implication is that the chemical toxinsthat pollute our environment also pollute our bodies, and
make us at least a little mentally slower. Pesticides andchemicals in processed foods and soft drinks also qualify as
chemical toxins.

Wouldn't it be interesting if most of the population would actually rank at or near the genius level, if not for the
consistent exposure to chemicals and toxins of all sorts while in the womb and throughout life?

If air pollution accounts for four to five points, it'd be easy to see where the lack of pesticides and chemical-ridden
processed foods would easily add on another five or possibly ten points. The absence of mercury, a toxin known to
affect the brain and found in vaccines and teeth fillings, could easily tack on another five points too. The list of known
poisons that today's humans regularly put in and on their bodies is astounding and reducing them would be fairly
simple if we made some concerted efforts.

Even physicians are catching on and understanding that what they thought was harmless, really is not.

Dr. Michael Msall, a University of Chicago pediatrician, said, "We are learning more and more about low-dose
exposure and how things we take for granted may not be a free ride."

A lower IQ wasn't the only thing researchers found connected with air pollution. In previous research, the same
researchers found that exposure to air pollution while in the womb was associated with genetic abnormalities that
may increase the risk for cancer, a smaller newborn head size and even reduced birth weight. The researchers also
linked air pollution with developmental delays at age three and asthma in children.
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S. PAL ARYA
Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences
North Carolina State University

New York Oxford

Oxford University Press
1999

Short-range dispersion of pollutants released from

near-surface sources is essentially determined by
small-scale motions and processes occurring in the
lowest layer of the atmospheric, called the planetary
boundary layer (PBL) or the atmospheric boundary
layer (ABL). The PBL is formed as a consequence of
interactions between the atmosphere and the underly-
ing land or water surface over short time scales of the
order of an hour to a day. Sharp variations in wind
speed, temperature, and scalar concentrations often oc-
cur near the surface due to these air-surface interac-
tions. The physical and thermal properties of the un-
derlying surface, in conjunction with the dynamics and
thermodynamics of the lower atmosphere (tropo-
sphere), determine the PBL structure including its
depth, wind and temperature distributions, transport,
mixing and diffusion properties, and energy dissipa-
tion. For a given air mass and synoptic weather situ-
ation, surface roughness and topography determine the
frictional resistance or drag that the surface exerts on
the atmosphere and, hence, the exchange of atmos-
pheric momentum to the surface. Similarly, thermal
properties of the surface, such as albedo, emissivity,
and moisture content, determine the thermodynamical
properties of the PBL and related exchanges of heat
and water vapor between the earth and the atmosphere.
A schematic of the PBL as the lower part of the tro-
posphere and the underlying land and water surfaces
is given in Figure 4.1

The PBL thickness is quite variable in both time

and space, particularly over land surfaces, ranging
from several tens of meters to a few kilometers. It is
commonly referred to as the mixing depth or mixing
height in air pollution literature, because pollutants re-
leased from near-surface sources are quickly mixed up
to the top of the PBL and are usually confined to the
PBL due to lack of mixing in the inversion layer above.
Largely in response to the strong diurnal cycle of heat-
ing and cooling of land surfaces in fair-weather con-
ditions, boundary-layer thickness and other charac-
teristics also display strong diurnal variations. In par-
ticular, the mixing depth typically varies from a low
value of the order of 100 m (range 20-500 m) during
nighttime and early morning hours to its maximum
value of the order of 1 km (range 0.2-5 km) in the late
afternoon. Diurnal variations of the mixing height and
other meteorological variables are found to be much
smaller over large lakes, seas, and oceans, because of
the small diurnal changes of the water surface tem-
perature due to large heat capacity of the mixed layer
in water.

Other temporal variations in the boundary layer

depth and structure often occur as a result of the evo-
lution and the passage of mesoscale and synoptic scale
systems. Generally, the boundary layer becomes thin-
ner under the influence of large-scale subsidence
(downward vertical motion) and low-level horizontal
divergence associated with the passage of a high-
pressure system (anticyclone). On the other hand, the
PBL can grow to be very deep and merge with tow-
ering clouds in disturbed weather conditions that are
associated with low-pressure systems. It is often dif-
ficult to even define and distinguish the PBL top un-
der these conditions; the cloud base is generally used
as an arbitrary cutoff for boundary layer studies. For
diffusion applications, however, air pollutants may not
be considered to be confined to the subcloud layer,
since these can be transported to large heights in the
troposphere through cloud-venting processes.

Spatial variations of the boundary layer depth and

structure occur as a result of changes in land use and
topography of the underlying surface and also due to
spatial variations of large-scale meteorological vari-
ables. The latter are usually ignored in boundary-layer