Project Surya is a scientific experiment aimed at quantifying the radiative forcing due to black carbon (BC) from biomass-fueled cooking and heating fires. Roughly 2.5 billion people depend on biomass burning for cooking and heating which contributes about 25% of the global BC emissions. Absorption of solar radiation by BC is estimated to contribute as much as 20% to 55% of the CO2 to global warming.
The study will encompass a detailed analysis of the results of efforts to reduce BC emissions from 350 rural households in the densely populated Indo-Gangetic plains (IGP) region of Northern India. The reductions would be achieved by replacing traditional village cooking stoves with poor combustion efficiencies to modern stoves with higher efficiencies. The fundamental goal of the year-long study will be to collect and analyze observational data to test whether the effects of conversion to "clean" cooking on radiative forcing are discernable, and whether the net result warms or cools. The change in net radiative forcing will warm if the reduction in reflecting aerosol is greater than the reduction in absorbing aerosol, and vise versa. The hypothesis is that the net reduction will result in cooling. This is what will be tested in this proof-of-concept study. The principal investigator (PI) estimates a ratio significantly greater than one, of reduced absorbing aerosol to reflecting aerosol, which means that a massive conversion to clean cooking would have a significant negative feedback (cooling) to CO2-forced warming. His estimate must be tested with observations. This EAGER award will enable that test. If he is right, the science and applications will be transformative. The project is risky for several reasons, among them are the robustness of the measurement of the ratio, the difficulties of upscaling information to much larger, more heterogeneous regions in India, and the new IT data collection techniques developed for working in an environment like an Indian village. If successful, the payoff could be globally significant.
Broader Impact: Project Surya could lead to the rapid reduction of warming aerosol and gases. With indoor pollution killing over a million people a year, global action to cut soot emissions could be of major and immediate benefit for both public health and the climate.
Award/Grant Number: AGS-1016496 V. Ramanathan Overall Summary: This NSF proposal funded Project Surya which resulted in: invention of a cell phone based soot monitoring instrument; identification of a forced-draft biomass cookstove, that led to significant reductions in CO2 emissions and soot emissions; major peer reviewed publications. Publications are denoted in the text by P-numbers and full citations are given in the reference section at the back; significant public interest as evidenced by OpEds in New York Times (P13) and San Diego Union Tribune (P14). Project Surya: One of the ten most innovative experiments as per Scientific American: Project Surya, initiated by the PI, is an integrated health and climate intervention that is replacing inefficient biomass cookstoves and lanterns with cleaner technologies and documenting the impacts of those changes. Surya is an international cook stove project that for the first time will measure and document the climate and health impacts of a large-scale introduction of clean cook stoves. Surya will deploy improved cooking technologies in a contiguous area home to about 50,000 individuals, and this technology change will drastically cut emissions of major pollutants, including black carbon. Public Interest: The Surya project and the research have been extensively covered in the media including a front page full size article in NY Times on Surya, Scientific American, McNeil and Lehrer news hour. The COP meeting at Copenhagen in 2009 also covered the Surya related work on the cover page of International Herald Tribune. The Eager project was done mostly with post docs and students (from US and India) including women researchers in the US and women volunteers in the village. We have produced two educational video on the project (www.projectsurya.org) which are used extensively in our lectures. In addition, the NSF award led to an invention of a new way of monitoring black carbon using cell phones. Lectures were given to undergraduate students in campuses, rotary clubs, business and community leaders and policy makers on issues related to air pollution and climate change. Research leads in part to major new policy shift by US and 5 other nations: On Feb 16th, 2012 Secretary of State Clinton announced an international coalition with UNEP and 5 other countries to mitigate short lived climate pollutants: methane; Ozone; black carbon and HFCs, Exec director of UNEP acknowledged the contribution of the PI (can be heard in the State Department archives). Major Achievements We have demonstrated the link between indoor and outdoor BC concentrations in and around the Surya pilot village [Rehman et al., 2011(P4)]. Our results demonstrate that cooking drives local outdoor BC concentrations. BC concentrations exhibit a strong diurnal pattern, with peaks during morning and evening cooking hours at magnitudes five times higher than mid-day and nighttime concentrations. Forced draft stoves are best from a BC mitigation perspective [Kar et al., 2012(P5)]. We found that certain forced draft technologies (which employ an external fan to drive airflow into the combustion chamber) clearly outperform natural draft technologies (which passively enhance airflow) in terms of BC reduction. These results were extended and corroborated by our pilot health impacts study across 9 villages in 2 states, which found that forced draft stoves provided superior reductions of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and carbon monoxide (CO). We have developed low-cost cellphone technologies that make it possible to measure BC on the ground with unprecedented spatial resolution for the first time [Ramanthan et al., 2011(P6)]. We successfully developed and field-tested this new instrument. This sensor technology cuts measurement costs by a factor of 10, enabling BC sampling over large, heterogeneous areas.. Publications supported fully or in part by the NSF fund: P1. Wallack, J. and Ramanathan, V. (2009), Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2009, pp. 105-113. P2. Ramanathan, V. and Xu, Y. (2010). Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 107 (18) 8055-8062. P3. Shindell, D, et al., Science, 335, 183. P4. Rehman, I.H., et al (2011) Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 7289–7299. P5. Kar, A., et al, Environ. Sci. Technol., 46, 2993−3000, dx.doi.org/10.1021/es203388g, 2012. P6. Ramanthan, N. et al., Atmos. Environ. vol 45, Issue 26, pp. 4481-4487. See also: Corrigendum (October 2011). P7. Praveen, P. S., et al., Atmos. Chem. Phys., 12, 1173–1187, doi:10.5194/acp-12-1173-2012. P8. Anenberg, S. C. et al., Environmental Science & Technology 47(9), 3944–52, doi:10.1021/es304942e. P9. . Anenberg, S. C.,et al., Environmental Health Perspectives, 120(6), 831-9, doi:10.1289/ehp.1104301. P10. Auffhammer, M.,et al., Climatic Change, Published Online 02 Septmeber 2011, 14 pp P11. Seddon, B. J., and V. Ramanathan (2013), Bottom-Up, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer, 48–53. P12. Andreae, M. O., and V. Ramanathan (2013), Science, 340, 280–281. P13. To Fight Climate Change, Clear the Air, Op Ed in The New York Times, November 27, 2010 P14. Saving our planet, saving ourselves, OpEd, San Diego, Union Tribune, April 21, 2012
