Associate Research Scientist Santiago Gassó was recently featured in two articles detailing the dangerous wildfires spreading across the Arctic Circle by Australia’s ABC World News and NASA Earth Observatory.
While wildfires are common in Alaska, these fires were across Siberia where fires of this severity are unexpected. The articles’ authors discovered Gassó on Twitter, where he was commenting on “smoke lids” created by the fire that billowed over 4.5 million square metres of land across northern Asia.
“Depending on how long it remains, it may have ecological consequences — for example, smoke this thick prevents the sunlight to reach the surface in the quantities needed for normal photosynthesis processes to occur,” he said to ABC.
In addition to his role at ESSIC, Gassó is also a research associate at NASA Goddard, specializing in observational studies of aerosols, clouds, and their interactions using a combination of satellite detectors. He has published several journal articles on the subject of dust transport at high latitudes as characterized by satellite, model, and surface observations.
To read the article by Australia’s ABC World News, click here: “Arctic Circle burns as heatwaves plague Europe and the US”. For the Earth Observatory article, click here: “Arctic Fires Fill the Skies with Soot”.
