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How strange and strange cell signals can help monitor Wildfire Ke

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As a passionate fire angry Eastern Australia In January 2020, a deadly fog It was located around Melbourne, a noticeable sign that residents were inside the house. Bouncing on their heads, however, was not such a significant sign: cellular data was in the air in a strange pattern that scientists could use to better understand and predict serious smoke events in the future.

The signals from the cells above Melbourne were interacting with the atmospheric rarity known as temperature inversion. You will usually find warmer temperatures close to the ground while the sun heats the surface and cooler temperatures in the atmosphere. But, according to its name, reversing the temperature flips.

When a layer of smoke was thrown through the city, it absorbed the sun’s energy, heating up a large portion of that radiation from the surface. This created a layer of hot, dry, smoky air sitting on the cooler air at ground level. “You have this double process,” says atmospheric scientist Adrien Guyot of Monash University, the lead author of a novel paper in the magazine AGU advances describing the research. “You have global warming and the earth isn’t normally warming up.”

This did strange things to the signals that were transmitted between the cell antennas above the buildings in Melbourne. (Guyot and his colleagues were looking at communication from antenna to antenna network exactly, not how people’s cell phones connected to them.) Usually, when these antennas talk to each other, the signal flies roughly directly. But reversing the temperature creates a kind of atmospheric plug, tilting the signal to the ground.

These are known as “abnormal propagation conditions,” which means that a signal travels abnormally. “It will bounce off the ground, and it will rise again, and then it will bounce off the ground, and it will rise again. So it will be trapped in the reverse layer, “says Guyot. Since the signal bounces, the trip between the antennas is different than it would be at normal times, when its path is more direct.” And it doesn’t always arrive at the same time. you have it, “Guyot added.” And it’s very clear on the sign. “

Looking at these cellular data, Guyot was then able to identify when a temperature reversal was established in Melbourne, when Australia was burned at the time of the fires. In addition to capturing these signals, the reverse layer also captured the smoke, thus creating a data record of what became of the city’s air quality. the worst in the world. In the future, Guyot believes, it is possible to control these cell signals to find out where an investment can occur and how serious it can be. This will give officials a better idea of ​​how fast air quality can be. “If you reverse the temperature, and if you’re strengthening the other way around, then you’re likely to increase the smoke concentration as well,” Guyot says.

Imagine throwing food colorings into an Olympic-size pool against a children’s pool; even if you have the same amount of dyes, you will get less water than dark water. The same is true of condensed smoke trapped in a thin layer of air near the ground, compared to smoke that spreads more widely in the open air. “Having these investments means that the smoke will not be transported to high altitudes,” says Rebecca Buchholz, an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who was not involved in this new work. “So it’s close to the ground, it’s very concentrated and there’s more pollution on the ground that can cause humans.”

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