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Environment

When nearly one million common murres died at sea and washed ashore from California to Alaska in 2015 and 2016, it was unprecedented. Scientists from the 91探花, the U.S. Geological Survey and others blame an unexpected squeeze on the ecosystem’s food supply, brought on by a severe and long-lasting marine heat wave known as “the blob.”

To better understand large, disruptive snowstorms, a 91探花 atmospheric scientist will lead a NASA field campaign this winter to fly through major snowstorms along the East Coast. The multi-institutional team will observe snow as it forms in clouds to help with satellite monitoring of snowfall and ultimately improve forecasts.

Communities underneath and downwind of jets landing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport are exposed to a type of ultrafine particle pollution that is distinctly associated with aircraft, according to a new 91探花 study, the first to identify the unique signature of aircraft emissions in the state of Washington. The finding comes from the two-year Mobile ObserVations of Ultrafine Particles or 鈥淢OV-UP鈥 study funded by the Washington State Legislature to examine the air-quality impacts of aircraft traffic on communities located…

91探花researchers have found that air pollution from electricity generation emissions in 2014 led to about 16,000 premature deaths in the continental U.S. In many states, the majority of the health impacts came from emissions originating in other states.

Two 91探花researchers 鈥 Bonnie Light, a principal physicist at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory and an affiliate associate professor of atmospheric sciences, and Madison Smith, a recent 91探花graduate who is now doing her postdoctoral research at the 91探花鈥 will join for the fifth of the six two-month legs, in summer 2020.

Researchers at the 91探花 and the University of Strathclyde report that, in Willapa Bay in Washington state, the water washing over the tidal flats during high tides is largely the same water that washed over the flats during the previous high tide. This “old” water has not been mixed in with “new” water from deeper parts of the bay or the open Pacific Ocean, and has different chemical and biological properties, such as lower levels of food for creatures within the tide flats.