(TibetanReview.net, Jun02’23) – Nitrogen oxides affect health and climate, and lakes on the Tibetan Plateau are emitting unexpectedly high levels of them, showing the effect of global warming, said a new research paper published on the nature.com website Jun 1.
The paper said that their emissions from inland waters such as lakes are generally considered negligible and are absent in air quality and climate models.
But “here we find unexpected high emissions of nitric oxide from remote lakes on the Tibetan Plateau, based on satellite observations of tropospheric nitrogen dioxide vertical column densities and subsequent emission inversion at a fine resolution of 5 km,” the paper’s authors – Hao Kong, Jintai Lin, Yuhang Zhang, Chunjin Li, Chenghao Xu, Lu Shen, Xuejun Liu, Kun Yang, Hang Su & Wanyun Xu – have said.
“Such strong natural emissions from inland waters have not been reported, to the best of our knowledge.
“The emissions are derived from microbial processes in association with substantial warming and melting of glacier and permafrost on the plateau, constituting a previously unknown feedback between climate, lake ecology and nitrogen emissions, “the paper has said.