“You can’t consider pollution as being a local phenomenon,” said Dr. James Drummond, an atmospheric physicist who studies the global dispersion of pollutants in the layer of the atmosphere found four to five kilometers above the Earth’s surface. “We kind of knew that already,” he said, “but when you actually see chemicals being transported, when you can visualize that, then it really takes hold.”
Drummond was the principal investigator on the team that developed a satellite designed to continuously track the global distribution of pollutants such as carbon monoxide. Dubbed MOPITT (Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere), the probe was launched in 1999. “There have been other launches since, but we were the first ones up doing global measurements.”
MOPITT’s findings have shed light on how far afield pollutants in the upper troposphere can travel. “As far as carbon monoxide-which is produced from wild fires-is concerned, we can see that being transported at least a third of the way across the world, easily from one continent to another,” said Drummond. Carbon monoxide from Africa crosses the Indian Ocean, reaching Australia; from China it crosses the Pacific to reach North America; and carbon monoxide emitted in North America drifts over Europe.
In 2003, pollutants sent up by huge forest fires in Siberia permeated the whole of the northern hemisphere. “Everybody affects everybody else downstream-the whole system is globally connected,” Drummond said. “You find that visibility thousands of kilometers away drops because of the outflow from these fires.”
Drummond completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Oxford University, before coming to U of T in 1979. This year, he became one of 13 U of T profs elected as fellows of the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada-an academic’s hall of fame. On this topic, Drummond was quite modest: “You feel such a fraud, because you’re always part of a team,” he said.
Most recently, Drummond has been working on a team that is setting up an Arctic research facility at Eureka, in Nunavut, an isolated environment where equipment must be flown in by cargo plane, and this only during summer. The station will be measuring air quality as well as looking for tell-tale signs of climate change. “Many people think that’s where the first real signs of change are going to happen,” he said.
But in order to observe such long-term trends, Drummond argued that Canadian science must do better to organizing things for the long term. “We have a scientific space program that is frankly the envy of the world,” he said. “For the amount of money that is spent, the scientific return is huge.” On the flip side, he added, “where we’re worst is in making long-term commitments to measurements, because so much of what we are funded for is focused on the short term.”
He has had to deal with up to 10 different funding agencies to secure grants for the Arctic station. “If you want a long-term data record to understand what long-term changes are happening, you need to make long-term measurements,” Drummond said. “You can’t make last year’s measurements this year.”
