Harvard’s ‘Hippo’ Jet Heads to Poles Sampling Greenhouse Gases

By Alex Morales

Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University will fly a specially equipped jet from the North Pole to the South Pole testing the atmosphere for variations in global-warming gases to improve computer models used in predicting climate change.

The three-year mission that began yesterday dubbed Hippo will use a modified Gulfstream V traveling first from Colorado to the Arctic before turning south via New Zealand toward Antarctica, the National Science Foundation, a collaborator in the Harvard-led project, said on its Web site.

The plane will cruise over mountains, seas, forests and cities at various altitudes to test concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases to find where they are being released and absorbed at exceptional rates. The findings will be produced in greater detail than any study to date, the scientists said.

“When we finish up, we’ll have a completely new picture about how greenhouse gases are entering the atmosphere and being removed from the atmosphere both by natural processes and by humans,” Steven Wofsy, professor of atmospheric and environmental science at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Harvard said in a video posted on the NSF Web site.

The United Nations said in 2007 that warmer temperatures globally are caused largely by man-made CO2 and other gases that hold on to the sun’s energy in the atmosphere. Scientists are trying to better understand where the gases originate and how well oceans and forests absorb them.

Current computer models for predicting the earth’s future climate have been questioned by some climatologists for how they handle little-understood heat transfers such as those done by low- level clouds over oceans.

Whole-Globe Snapshot

“It’s the first time we’ve been able to look at the whole globe all at once,” Wofsy said. “Nobody has ever done that. Satellites see the whole globe, but they don’t see it in great detail.”

The mission’s acronym, Hippo, stands for Hiaper Pole-to-Pole Observations. Hiaper stands for High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research.

Four further series of flights will be carried out through 2011, the Arlington, Virginia-based National Science Foundation said. Each will take 21 days, according to the Boulder, Colorado- based National Center for Atmospheric Research, another project collaborator, on its Web site.

The planes are scheduled to fly first from Boulder to Anchorage, Alaska, and then to a latitude of about 85 degrees north. They’ll double back to Hawaii, American Samoa, and New Zealand, and cruise down to 67 degrees south and on to Easter Island, Costa Rica and back to Colorado.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net.