India's Mars Mission Envy

India's Mangalyaan (Mars Craft) spaceship and its successful insertion into Mars' orbit is exciting on so many fronts. What I'm most excited about is that one of its instruments is searching for methane. The Mars Express mission detected raised levels of the molecule way back in 2004. This discovery was heralded as being a possible indicator of microbial life on Mars, or maybe the marker of geological activity on the planet (admittedly less exciting but not a bad consolation prize!). While the NASA Maven mission entered Mars orbit rather more quietly a few days ago it has mission objectives focussed elsewhere, on the passing of a nearby comet and then the upper atmosphere of Mars. I can't seem to find a way of constructing a sentence about the Maven mission that doesn't seem patronising or dismissive but the truth is that I'm more excited by far about India's mission. Not only am I looking forward to the methane detection experiment results, this is a great accomplishment for India.

I haven't read a single news article yet that hasn't drawn attention to the notion that India would have been better off redistributing the $75 million it spent on the mission (around a tenth of what the Maven mission cost!) on feeding and clothing hungry citizens. There are even snarky digs at the fact that the country receives aid while having the audacity to perform science. This seems to me to completely miss the point. India has pulled off a fantastic feat of engineering here, for a bargain no less! How can this possibly be anything other than good for their economy and standing in the world? If we are worried about the poverty in the country then surely it is more helpful to improve the industry, infrastructure and reputation of the country. The Mangalyaan mission will do all of those things, even if indirectly. The western world has been driving for years towards the notion that science must always be directly practical in its application, otherwise it is somehow unworthy and wasteful. I'm glad that India at least can overcome this lack of vision and I hope that they, as a country, can make great accomplishments in areas where we must now rely on private citizens and companies.

Something in the Air

A lot happens at the Met Office that goes largely unreported upon. For example, planting transmitters on seals to measure sea temperature might not be the first thing to cross your mind if you were asked what the Met Office actually does. As I listened to a talk this week about tracking the spread of atmospheric particles I realised that this was something else that would fall under this umbrella. Time for a blog post!

The talk was by the Atmospheric Dispersion and Quality (ADAQ) group who are responsible for some very interesting aspects of the MO services like supporting the emergency services in the event of civil contingencies like chemical fires, radioactive accidents, volcanic ash and animal and plant health. This is achieved through the use of NAME - the Nuclear Accident ModEl, one of the more outrageous examples of acronym abuse I've come across.

NAME was developed by the MO following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 when weather conditions conspired to spread the released radioactive particles across Europe, including the Welsh hills. How exactly this happened can be seen in the model image below.

Since then, NAME has been through multiple iterations, capable of predicting the transport, dispersion and chemistry of atmospheric particles. If you're interested in the gritty (haha) details then I can tell you that it does this through the modelling of core atmospheric processes such as turbulence, deep convection, deposition & sedimentation^* and chemistry. If you want to know exactly how it does that then here would be a good place to start.

^*material removed from atmosphere by transport to, and uptake by the ground. Gravitational settling, rain 'washout' (material is brought down to ground by rain), rain absorption (precipitation forms around particles directly).

The latest generation of NAME is NAME III and this has been used extensively in recent times to track the effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the second event ever to reach the highest rating of 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Research into the health effects of the Fukushima disaster is ongoing, incorporating the results of NAME's model analysis.

NAME is supported by many tools which work over different scales, interesting in various ways. In order of increasing scale over which they function:

• PACRAM (Procedures And Communications in the event of a release of Radioactive Material) gives little information generally but the main priority is to be fast so as to advise emergency services, etc. on possible hazardous directions or areas to avoid in the event of a UK nuclear power plant event.

• RIMNET (not sure if this is a really convoluted acronym or just a name...) a Met Office-managed project in partnership with DECC and DEFRA. A country-wide network of gamma radiation detectors (isn't this a plot device from the Avengers?!) which allow the UK to monitor background radiation levels. All measurement and reference data is stored in the UK National Nuclear Database.
• Regional Specialized Meteorological Centers and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) give the international radiological response. The CTBTO (actually a preparatory commission as the treaty is not yet law) are tasked with establishing and developing a worldwide network which monitors the planet for nuclear explosions. This network is reportedly 85 percent complete at the time of writing.

One of the more useful aspects of atmospheric modelling is that it can be run backwards to establish the source of an atmospheric feature. For example, if a non-reported nuclear event were to occur, this can be traced back to its source through inputting current observations into the NAME model.

This feature has proved particularly useful in disease control such as in the outbreak of  Legionnaires Disease in Edinburgh in 2012. Not only can the model predict the spread of airborne bacteria and so inform the public and authorities if certain areas are at particularly high risk but, once an infection has been found, the model can be run backwards to see where the bacteria might have originated from in the first place. Useful again in the case of animal and plant health. The Met Office has been researching the spread of Foot and Mouth Disease since the 1960s, again through the dispersion in the atmosphere of airborne particles originating from infected pigs.

There is more use to this than might be immediately obvious, vaccines are often limited in amount, especially in the case of a sudden outbreak. By identifying the likely spread of diseases, the vaccines can be distributed in a targeted way.

There are yet more applications of this technology and, to be honest, I wasn't particularly familiar with them before the talk. I'd heard of 'Ash dieback', apparently spread on the small scale (up to 10s of miles) by windborne spores but what has apparently been called the 'polio of wheat', UG99, is also the subject of Met Office research.