NASA scientist Tom Hanisco is helping to fill a big gap in
scientists' understanding of how much urban pollution -- and
more precisely formaldehyde -- ultimately winds up in Earth's
upper atmosphere where it can wreak havoc on Earth's protective
ozone layer. He and his team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md., have developed an automated,
lightweight, laser-induced fluorescence device that measures the
levels of this difficult-to-measure organic compound in the
lower troposphere and then again at much higher altitudes. The
primary objective is determining how much pollution a storm can
transport through convection and then using those insights to
improve chemistry-climate models. "It's a major problem in
modeling knowing how to treat transport and clouds," Hanisco
explained. In the spring, he flew the In-Situ Airborne
Formaldehyde Instrument for the first time on a NASA DC-8
research aircraft, a former passenger airplane that can fly up
to 43,000 feet. Size and Sensitivity "People like thi