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Week 2/2011: Focusing on Johannesburg

The wind, filled with “signs of life” from Johannesburg, brings so much pollution up to a distance travelled in four hours that the vegetation suffers. The savannah is burning in one direction and soot is floating in the air. The dark polluted air efficiently warms up the climate.

Physician Lauri Laakso has resided or travelled in South Africa for five years, and his work is starting to show results. He has set up the continent's most diverse climate measuring station, and was recently honoured by the local North-West University, which appointed him Extraordinary Associate Professor. Laakso's plans for 2011 include a few publications of his own and many more by his colleagues based on the measuring results obtained in Africa.

“The range of possible themes is crazy! Optics, aerosol physics and chemistry, ion research, ecosystem analysis, testing water balance models created on the basis of satellite measuring, to mention a few.”

Laakso, sitting in his office in Helsinki, is pointing at his colleagues' rooms at the university and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. “Finding the scientifically most interesting questions still involves a lot of work,” says Laakso. The first task has been to build the framework for the work and to launch reliable measuring. “Before this, Cape Town has been Africa's only location which meets the scientific criteria for measuring the basic state of the atmosphere.”

Although some research questions are in the process, Laakso clearly has put a lot of thought in ozone, for example. During the day, when the sky is clear, there is a lot of light and ozone reactions are underway, the aerosols in the air oxidise in an entirely different way than in the evening – when it is dinner time in the second-largest city in Sub-Saharan Africa. The difference also makes the processes of sunlight dispersion and cloud formation different.

The inclusion of a mass spectrometer in the research station equipment was a big step of progress. The spectrometer continuously measures the chemical consistency of aerosols.  A key idea right from the launch of the Africa cooperation has been to train the partners there to a research team which is as independent as possible.

Laakso commends Lecturer Paul Beukes the most. Beukes will visit Kumpula next Midsummer to learn more about the data analysis to be able to ensure the quality of data collected at the station and to fully utilise it. “Having worked in the industrial sector, Paul returned to the university and is highly committed – he will certainly soon become a professor.”

Text Virve Pohjanpalo
Photo: Lauri Laakso

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