Category Archives: Atmospheric Gases

Dairies and Air Pollution

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Last week, at the invitation of Dr. Ellen Jordan (Extension Dairy Specialist, Dallas), I made a short presentation at the annual Dairy Outreach Program Area (DOPA) workshop in Stephenville.  Dairy producers in the Central Texas (Erath, Comanche, Johnson, Bosque, and Hamilton Counties) and East Texas (Hopkins, Rains, and Wood Counties) DOPAs  are required under their state water-quality permits to obtain a certain number of continuing-education units each year.  Because these CEU programs are a regulatory requirement, they’re usually well attended, and this year’s was no exception:  somewhere around 45… Read More →

Atmospheric Ammonia in the Texas Panhandle

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Under a contract with the National Trends Network, a national monitoring network sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture, we operate a monitoring site on the south rim of North Ceta Canyon.  At Cañonceta we measure ground-level, atmospheric ammonia concentrations, wet deposition, and dry deposition. Why ammonia?  Mainly because in the presence of atmospheric moisture, ammonia can dissolve into that moisture and then react with other airborne species – mainly sulfate and nitrate – to form fine particles.  These particles scatter light pretty efficiently, so at high… Read More →