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Smog, or smoke fog, is a type of intense air pollution. The word "smog" was coined in the early 20th century, and is a portmanteau of the words smoke and fog [ 1 ] to refer to smoky fog due to its opacity, and odor. [ 2 ] The word was then intended to refer to what was sometimes known as pea soup fog, a familiar and serious problem in London ...
e. Air pollution is the contamination of air due to the presence of substances called pollutants in the atmosphere that are harmful to the health of humans and other living beings, or cause damage to the climate or to materials. [ 1 ] It is also the contamination of the indoor or outdoor environment either by chemical, physical, or biological ...
Ground-level ozone is both naturally occurring and anthropogenically formed. It is the primary constituent of urban smog, forming naturally as a secondary pollutant through photochemical reactions involving nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds in the presence of bright sunshine with high temperatures. [33]
Acid clouds can grow on SO 2 emissions from refineries, as seen here in Curaçao. Acid rain is rain or any other form of precipitation that is unusually acidic, meaning that it has elevated levels of hydrogen ions (low pH). Most water, including drinking water, has a neutral pH that exists between 6.5 and 8.5, but acid rain has a pH level lower ...
Ozone-oxygen cycle in the ozone layer. The photochemical mechanisms that give rise to the ozone layer were discovered by the British physicist Sydney Chapman in 1930. Ozone in the Earth's stratosphere is created by ultraviolet light striking ordinary oxygen molecules containing two oxygen atoms (O 2), splitting them into individual oxygen atoms (atomic oxygen); the atomic oxygen then combines ...
The Great Smog of 1952 in London. Early in December 1952, a cold fog descended upon London. Because of the cold, Londoners began to burn more coal than usual. The resulting air pollution was trapped by the inversion layer formed by the dense mass of cold air. Concentrations of pollutants, coal smoke in particular, built up dramatically.
Haze can be defined as an aerial form of the Tyndall effect therefore unlike other atmospheric effects such as cloud, mist and fog, haze is spectrally selective in accordance to the electromagnetic spectrum: shorter (blue) wavelengths are scattered more, and longer (red/ infrared) wavelengths are scattered less.
Ozone depletion is not a primary cause of climate change, however there exists a physical science connection between the two phenomena. The Earth's atmospheric ozone has two major effects on the Earth's temperature balance. Firstly, it absorbs solar ultraviolet radiation, leading to the heating of the stratosphere.