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Sunrise over Manila Bay and Metro Manila

Embrace of the Monsoon

By Genie Lorenzo Pearson

A Life of Science: A Series by New Scientists

If scientists can come to a consensus as to how particles change clouds and vice versa, they can better understand how those changes affect sunlight management and rainfall production globally.

The Carson Scholars program at the University of Arizona is dedicated to training the next generation of environmental researchers in the art of public communication, from writing to speaking. Partnering with Terrain.org, the program will present essays and other writing from students and alumni of the Carson Scholars Program—A Life of Science—with hopes of inspiring readers to understand not only research findings but the textures of the lives of scientists and others engaged in the crucial work of helping the planet along in an age of unprecedented change.
  

Something about the balmy ocean breeze soothes me. Perhaps it is because I grew up so close to the sea, even while living in the highly urbanized metropolis of Metro Manila. One day when my niece Iya was still a baby, she cried so hard we did not know what to do. As a last resort, we brought her to the oceanside to catch the famous Manila Bay sunset. There, the Asian summer southwest monsoon was blowing steadily. Wondrously, the embrace of the strong ocean breeze finally stopped her crying.

Aerial view of sunset in Manila Bay, with ship.
Sunlight and clouds over Manila Bay, with ship, 2008.
Photo by Genie Lorenzo Pearson.
Manila Bay is the gateway to Metro Manila, the Philippines’s capital and largest megacity. Its coast is a natural harbor and so a strategic location for a port. It has become a place that bears witness to the movements of humans in and out of the Philippines. Manila Bay has received visitors that have come and gone through our country’s history, including the Manila galleons, large Spanish ships used for military purposes and then later for trade. They brought and received goods from Asia, the Americas, and Europe in the early 1800s. These sailing ships relied entirely on the trade winds, monsoon winds, and ocean currents to bring them from Acapulco to Manila Bay and back again.           

Manila Bay still hosts ships from all over the world but, rather than wind energy, these ships now run predominantly on fossil fuels. Ship exhaust forms clouds that trace the ships’ paths over water. They are visible from satellites above the earth in some areas of the world as white and fluffy intertwined veins. Clouds form when water vapor condenses on particles in the air. The particles on which clouds form, such as sea salt or emissions from volcanoes and wildfires, are called cloud condensation nuclei, or CCN. CCN must be small and attracted enough to water for clouds to form on them. The increasing numbers of ships, cities, and wildfires in and around the Philippines and indeed around the world are adding particles to the air and “man-made seeds” on which clouds can “grow,” increasing or decreasing certain cloud types depending on particle size and composition. These changes affect total absorbed and reflected sunlight as well as how much rainfall is produced in the Philippines and other similarly polluted marine regions around the world.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, how particles contribute to warming or cooling the atmosphere is the greatest source of uncertainty in our understanding of climate change. More observations are needed at ground and cloud levels, and especially over the oceans, to help reduce this uncertainty. If scientists can come to a consensus as to how particles change clouds and vice versa (called aerosol-cloud interactions), they can better understand how those changes affect sunlight management and rainfall production globally.  This is the motivation for my research as a Ph.D. student in Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona.

CAMP2Ex participants
NASA Cloud, Aerosol and Monsoon Processes Philippines Experiment (CAMP2Ex) meeting in Pasadena, California in 2022.
Photo by Vidal Salazar, courtesy NASA.
In 2019, I had the opportunity to participate in an airborne field campaign led by NASA called the Cloud, Aerosol, and Monsoon Processes Philippines Experiment, or CAMP2Ex. The goal was to figure out how particle emissions from growing human activity in and around Metro Manila, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia are changing clouds and affecting the regional and global climate. During the campaign, which ran from August to October 2019, around the time of the southwest monsoon, researchers flew two airplanes loaded with state-of-the-art instruments over the ocean around the Philippines to analyze particles and clouds. I was one of over 200 researchers who were involved in background studies, the actual field campaign, and data analysis.   

Early results from CAMP2Ex suggest that, during the southwest monsoon, a combination of particles in the region originating from wildfires and emissions from cities and ships are acting as CCN and making clouds grow taller. Yet, how this affects global temperatures, the monsoons, and rainfall is something we still need to tease out. As students, our research examines the properties of the particles collected by these aircrafts. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in a NASA mission, especially for someone like me from a developing country. My focus is on how the observed particles attract water and can become CCN, impacting solar radiation and the formation of clouds. It seems providential that I can help in this international effort which was based only a few hours away from my hometown and the comforting Manila Bay.      

Sun photometer
NASA sun photometer on the Manila Observatory rooftop.
Photo courtesy Manila Observatory.
Metro Manila has expanded rapidly beyond the city limits of the “galleon times”. The city was second to Warsaw in greatest square miles of destruction after World War II. At the same time, it was also adjusting to a new government after American occupation. The new government focused on basic services such as water and roads during the rebuilding of the city, so real estate development was delegated to the private sector. This may help explain the hasty urbanization that has happened in and around Metro Manila over the last 50 years. Mass transportation also had to be reimagined, and entrepreneurs developed post-war remnants of American military jeeps for public use. These “jeepneys” have evolved to become one of the country’s most relied-on forms of transportation. Their popularity is immortalized in a song (“Hinahanap-hanap kita Manila…”) from the viewpoint of a lover longing for his childhood muse, crooning his deep desire for homecoming and the familiar spectacle of jeepneys that hover over its streets. These jeepneys, along with tricycles, cargo trucks, and a growing fleet of private vehicles, have become the bloodline of Metro Manila’s booming populace chugging day by day to make ends meet. Despite their iconic origins, these vehicles all contribute to Metro Manila’s infamous air pollution.

I was in high school when I was introduced to the air pollution situation in Metro Manila. A layer of sticky, black particles would coat my face after a ten-mile cramped stop-and-go bus ride to school, worsening my acne flare-ups. After college, I went to work at the Manila Observatory as a research assistant and learned about the technical components of air quality, such as particulate matter and black carbon from the incomplete combustion of carbon-containing fuels, the ubiquitous black particles (also called soot) that aggravated my acne in high school. I did not enjoy the constant exposure to Metro Manila’s poor air quality as I set up air samplers for my work. However, I also recognized that the particles affected not only my skin but also the respiratory health of the entire population. Black carbon also affects the global climate because these particles absorb light, warming the atmosphere. Additionally, black carbon hinders cloud growth due to their aversion to water. My research motivation thus grew beyond my own discomfort, and I was inspired by the mission of the Manila Observatory to work with communities and their environmental realities through science.

Through our work in the observatory, I also became aware of the complex social impact of air pollution, issue such as poverty that may seem more pressing than air pollution. For example, it took almost a decade after stakeholder discussions began for motorized tricycle operators to come to the table and agree to shift from two-stroke to four-stroke engines. This is understandable, because their livelihood was threatened and there was inadequate transitional support for them. But environmental issues and poverty are interlinked. Unemployment, population increase, an underdeveloped agricultural sector, and risks due to conflicts and environmental disasters all affect the economy of the Philippines. Air pollution’s wide-reaching effects, from people’s health to global climate, make it an urgent environmental crisis that we must address together.

Researchers at Manila Observatory
University of Arizona researchers visit Manila Observatory in 2018 to prepare for NASA CAMP2Ex, where Genie Lorenzo Pearson met her future Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Armin Sorooshian.
Photo by Obie Cambaliza.
The Manila Observatory has been studying earth sciences in the Philippines since 1865 and air quality since the 1990s. On the observatory rooftop, a weather station measures air temperature and sunshine. Behind it, a device that looks like a bucket with spikes, which deter the birds from roosting, detects rain. Above the bucket are spinning cups and an arrow-shaped rod—an anemometer and a wind vane—that measure wind speed and direction. Nearby is a sun photometer, which looks like a robot arm that moves every 15 minutes to look at the sun. The sun photometer infers the sizes and types of particles in the air up to several kilometers above the ground. Just across from the robot arm are pumps that run for a day or two, pulling in air through filters to collect particles which are subsequently analyzed in the lab.    

Years before CAMP2Ex, observatory and government researchers had already made an alarming discovery that air filters exposed for 24 hours to roadside Metro Manila air became black as soot. We had to recheck our lab procedures to make sure we had analyzed the filter samples properly. We found out that Metro Manila traffic produces some of the greatest levels of black carbon in the world. This awareness has led to improved implementation of emissions standards that have significantly improved air quality in Metro Manila.

At elevations greater than one kilometer from the ground, when particles from traffic become more mixed with the surrounding air, the sun photometer senses air that is still relatively clean. Winds over bodies of water around the Philippines dilute the particles from the city. Air pollution can also travel into the Philippines from East Asia, which is the region’s largest industrial air pollution source. These winds cause the transported particles, mostly sulfate particles that cool the atmosphere (unlike black carbon), to aggravate Metro Manila air quality. Smoke particles from massive wildfires in Borneo (in the Maritime Continent), a mixture of black and organic carbon, have also been detected in filter samples at the Manila Observatory.

Over the past five years, I have been working in the University of Arizona in Tucson, far away from the Southeast Asian southwest monsoon. These days, I am in the field less often and work mostly on my computer to analyze the data from the CAMP2Ex campaign for my doctoral research. I was shocked by the prevalence of smoke from the maritime continent wildfires that we found throughout southern Southeast Asia during the southwest monsoon and the potential they have to affect clouds. These smoke particles are not as water-loving as particles that clouds have typically formed on in the past. This changing particle profile influences the amount of solar radiation reflected or absorbed by particles and cloud formation over the region in ways that need more research to be fully understood. Yet their impacts on global climate, and the total and type of rain that makes its way to the Philippines and Southeast Asia, are already underway, affecting agriculture and human safety. This is concerning because more wildfires are projected with climate change and changing rainfall has already been observed in the Philippines during the southwest monsoon.

Particles
Particles of different sizes (in micrometers) collected in Metro Manila in 2018 using an air sampler from the University of Arizona. Black carbon is abundant at size ranges less than 1 micrometer.
Image courtesy Melliza Templonuevo Cruz, et al.
Climate change is upon us, and when we begin to realize its effects on our lives, we can feel hopeless. So, our collective efforts are needed to help protect our common home. Recently an insightful middle school student from a science class in Tucson, where I recently spoke about our work on aerosol particles and climate, encouraged me. He asked what we can do to address climate change. For example, could we inject particles such as sulfate particles from industry or volcanoes into the air  to cool the Earth? This is an example of using aerosol-cloud interactions for geoengineering, which is being promoted by some sectors as a possible solution to climate change. While injecting particles into the air could potentially cool the atmosphere, scientists are just beginning to study the viability and risks related to geoengineering. In the meantime, it is important to continue to reduce emissions within our communities and engage different stakeholders in discussions that can curb climate change, rather than exacerbate risks. The student’s question made me feel hopeful that young people are not only concerned about climate change but are also envisioning ways to counteract the climate crisis.

NASA satellite image
NASA Worldview screenshot of satellite image of the wildfires in Southeast Asia. The red dots show the locations of active fires, and the smooth grayish-brown regions show smoke from the wildfires. The pink line is the approximate CAMP2Ex research flight path, on September 16, 2019, that is closest to the smoke.
Image courtesy NASA.
My niece Iya is now 17 years old. It has been five years since I moved to Tucson, far away from the balmy ocean breeze of the Philippines. Tucson, though, is less than 500 kilometers from the ocean where the Spanish Galleons sailed between Acapulco and Manila Bay many years ago. Surprisingly, I have also found a respite in the desert and its mostly dry winds but equally beautiful sunsets. This summer another niece, Bella, will be visiting Tucson just before the North America monsoon sets in. I am hopeful that she too will feel comfort in the wonder of the winds and sky that embrace us all.       

 

 

Genie LorenzoGenie Lorenzo Pearson received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona analyzing aerosol data from ground sensors, aircraft, and satellites. She is from the Philippines and worked with Manila Observatory on air quality and extreme weather research. Genie is currently a postdoctoral associate in the University of Miami.

Header photo of sunrise over Metro Manila and Manila Bay by hintsvisuals, courtesy Shutterstock.

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