News & Events

New study finds surprisingly high contribution from paints, pesticides, perfumes as vehicle emissions drop: 

Chemical products that contain compounds refined from petroleum, like household cleaners, pesticides, paints and perfumes, now rival motor vehicle-related emissions as the top source of urban air pollution, according to a surprising NOAA-led study.

People use a lot more fuel than they do petroleum-based compounds in chemical products—about 15 times more by weight, according to the new assessment. Even so, lotions, paints and other products contribute about as much to air pollution as the transportation sector does, said lead author Brian McDonald, a CIRES scientist working in NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Division. 

NREL's Executive Energy Leadership Academy is a nationally renowned program that provides non-technical business, governmental, and community leaders an opportunity to learn about advanced energy technologies, analytical tools, and financing to guide their organizations and communities in energy-related decisions and planning. The Leadership Program is designed for community and industry leaders with an interest in exploring renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies, applications, and issues. Participants are required to travel to NREL's main campus in Golden, Colorado, for four multi-day sessions from June through September.

The program provides an in-depth look at solar and wind power, bioenergy and transportation, energy efficient building technologies and energy systems integration.  Course content includes information on performance characteristics of the technologies, economics, and analytical tools. 

NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) instrument, designed and built by LASP, launched today from Kourou, French Guiana aboard SES-14, a commercial communications satellite built by Airbus Defence and Space. GOLD will investigate the dynamic intermingling of space and Earth’s uppermost atmosphere—and is the first NASA science mission to fly an instrument as a commercially hosted payload.

Space is not completely empty: It’s teeming with fast-moving charged particles and electric and magnetic fields that guide their motion. At the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, the charged particles— called the ionosphere—co-exist with the upper reaches of the neutral atmosphere, called the thermosphere. The two commingle and influence one another constantly. This interplay—and the role terrestrial weather, space weather and Earth’s own magnetic field each have in it—is the focus of GOLD’s mission. 

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The government’s National Climate Assessment cited human influence as the "dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." The report affirms that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of a worst-case scenario where seas could rise as high as eight feet by the year 2100, and details climate-related damage across the United States that is already unfolding as a result of an average global temperature increase of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. When it comes to rapidly escalating levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the report states, “there is no climate analog for this century at any time in at least the last 50 million years.”

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist David Fahey in Boulder is one of the lead authors of the study which draws on research from numerous government agencies. The full report is available for download via the The Washington Post.