NASA Finds Sea Ice Driving Arctic Air Pollutants (Northwest Territories)

Bromine explosion on March 13, 2008 across the western Northwest Territories in Canada looking toward the Mackenzie Mountains at the horizon, which prevented the bromine from crossing over into Alaska. The bromine explosion is depicted in the foreground by the red-orange areas, while the green shades at high altitudes on the mountains represent areas where there was no increase in bromine.

The bromine measurements are from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment-2 (GOME-2) instrument aboard the MetOp-A satellite. GOME-2 is developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). MetOp-A is operated by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).

A team from the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, led by Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., produced the study, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research- Atmospheres. The team combined data from six NASA, European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency satellites; field observations and a model of how air moves in the atmosphere to link Arctic sea ice changes to bromine explosions over the Beaufort Sea, extending to the Amundsen Gulf in the Canadian Arctic. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.