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Brown clouds are a transcontinental issue

  • 14/11/2005

Why has the Asian Brown Cloud now become the Atmospheric Brown Cloud?
Brown clouds have been seen all over the world, including the us , Europe, India and China. Earlier, our focus was on South Asia; so we called these clouds the Asian Brown Cloud. Several Indian scientists and politicians criticised this appellation as politically-motivated. We agreed that the nomenclature was inaccurate, though we did not think that this had anything to do with politics. Anyhow, we changed the brown cloud's name to Atmospheric Brown Cloud. This name is scientifically apposite. But we have persisted with the acronym, abc, simply because it's very popular.

Since your 1999 findings on the effects of brown clouds in the Indian Ocean, have there been similar studies in other parts of the world?
Immediately after our Indian Ocean experiments (indoex), there were two similar studies