What is the Arctic Haze?
Abstract:

During winter, the atmosphere surrounding the Arctic region astonishingly becomes a storehouse of large concentrations of pollutants. This polluted air mass, almost as large as the African continent, covers the whole of the atmospheric region above the Arctic as well as extend down over Eurasia and North America (Shaw 1995). This ‘accumulation of visibility-reducing aerosols’ in the Arctic is known as the Arctic haze. The term was first used in 1956 by J. Murray Mitchell, a US Air Force officer stationed in Alaska, to describe “the haze encountered during the Ptarmigan (bird) reconnaissance flights” (Raatz 1983).


Assistant Researcher, Geography and You