The infrared system that detects and informs about volcanic ash in the atmosphere has been tested on Airbus in Toulouse, France. – We are happy to confirm that the system also works in high altitudes where the big commercial aircrafts fly, says Dr. Fred Prata from NILU, inventor of the system.
From NILU’s Annual magazine: Senior scientist Armin Wisthaler and NILU’s new mass spectrometer can detect volatile contaminants at unprecedented speed including species that have never been detected before. It is now also possible to analyse for example organic pollutants in the atmosphere from an airplane at full speed, to study unknown chemical reactions in indoor air and to investigate a series of other dependencies of importance for environment and human health.
Article from NILU’s Annual Magazine: Air quality in several major Norwegian cities is now so bad that it causes significant health problems, and if worst comes to worst, air quality may even be poorer in the coming years. “The good news is that there are measures that can improve air quality,” says NILU’s Leonor Tarrasón.
From NILU’s Annual magazine 2011: NILU’s Fred Prata has developed an “ash camera” that alerts airplane pilots to the presence of ash clouds, allowing the aircraft to avoid having to be grounded by volcanic eruptions. The camera is now being tested on EasyJet’s aircraft.
Article from NILU’s Annual magazine 2011: Three days after a volcanic eruption in Iceland in May 2011, the Met Office in London warned that volcanic ash in the skies over large parts of southern Norway could represent a danger to air traffic. But Norwegian experts had their own models and good satellite data and concluded that air traffic could resume as normal.
The Norwegian Government’s 2012 white paper on climate change states that research on the effects of global warming and measures to address the problem will continue to be a high priority, along with research on the climate system itself. Research is also an important priority in the Government’s High North strategy. But is the same effort being made in environmental monitoring, the cornerstone of climate research?
Knut Breivik and co-authors won the award as 1st Runner-Up Best Policy Analysis paper for 2011, published in the scientific journal Environmental Science & Technology. The title of the paper is “Are reductions in industrial organic contaminants emissions in rich countries achieved partly by export of toxic wastes?”.
The recent kick-off of the second major project in Bangladesh demonstrates NILUs cooperative efforts in assessing and managing the air quality problems in the country.
– The COMETproject will explore how we can work together to “act local but think global”, says Alice Newton, a global change researcher from Norway.
The trunk of the capsized Costa Concordia is waiting to be retrieved. Scientists of the EU FP7 project HydroNet see potential for deployment of their newly developed robotic catamaran that is able to identify and measure different chemicals in the water.
The eruption of Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 ejecting enormous ask plumes into the air, lead to severe problems for air traffic, grounding millions of passengers and leaving airlines with a loss of billions. Now, Nicarnica is testing an ‘ash camera’ with easyJet, developed by Dr. Fred Prata from NILU. By use of such a device, a chaos with the 2010 dimensions could be greatly reduced in the future.
European air quality shows small signs of improvements over the last two decades, but some pollution concentrations are still a threat to human health. This is the conclusion of a new report about European air quality, published by the European Parliament in November 2011.
From 25-26 October 2011, an international group of 70 scientists met at Lillestrøm Centre of Expertise for the 10th Ny-Ålesund seminar, hosted by NILU.
Early last week, Fred Prata and Adam Durant from Nicarnica Aviation and NILU left behind the Oslo winter and travelled over 3000 miles to Sicily for the AVOID (The Airborne Volcanic Object Imaging Detector) flight trials. In this blog Adam describes the first week of work.
A new study by an international team of researchers estimates that the emissions from the power plant started earlier, lasted longer and are therefore higher than assumed in most studies conducted before.
The ozone layer over Norway appears to have stopped thinning. At the same time, however, NILU measured record low seasonal levels of ozone last winter.
Many skin care products contain a variety of chemical substances with partially unknown and possibly harmful effects, and these chemicals not only affect your skin. They end up in your blood – and in the environment as far north as the Arctic.
The first results from the collaboration between the Department of Environment in Bangladesh and NILU.
Large European communities generate significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using mobile communication devices, computers and sensors which are mostly connected to the internet.
MEMORI: Measurement, Effect Assessment and Mitigation of Pollutant Impact on Movable Cultural Assets. NILU is from 1st November 2011 coordinating a new EC project; MEMORI. MEMORI will go on for three years until the end of 2014.
NILU has signed a cooperative agreement with Hubei Environmental Protection Bureau (Hubei EPB) and Green Business Norway (GBN). The agreement aims to develop an air quality management and early warning system for nine cities in the Hubei Province of China.
Bangladesh is suffering from some of the world’s worst urban air quality problems. Particularly in the non-monsoon period the concentrations of particulate matter regularly exceed proposed standards. The larger cities such as Dhaka and Chittagong have major traffic issues which represent a source of the air quality problems, while industrial sources such as steel mills, cement factories, and brick kilns are also considerable sources. NILU, in cooperation with the Bangladesh Department of Environment, has received NORAD funding for a three-year project to study and address these issues.