Air Quality: A Tale of Three Cities

Dr. Bryan N. Duncan is a deputy project scientist for the Aura Mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He recently presented the story of air quality in three cities: Beijing, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Instruments on NASA satellites monitor pollution around the world. One of these, The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on the Aura satellite, has observed large amounts of sulfur dioxide, which is released when coal is burned, over Beijing. Similarly, in the 1950s Los Angeles e