India Can Now Access Pc Program To Track Acid Rain

India and other Asian nations can now access a powerful computer program to track one of the most menacing environmental hazards facing the region acid rain and chart out contingency plans.

Put together by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank , the personal computer-based software package depicts acid deposition on a colour coded map of the region.

The user can create possible future scenarios by entering data such as energy supply and demand, construction of new power plants and emissions control options and the program will shift the colours to show how acid deposition and its impact would change for each scenario, a World Bank release here said.

 

The programme is called Rains Asia (regional acidification information and simulation model for Asia).

The program covers 23 nations stretching from Afghanistan to Japan, including 94 specific Asian sub regions.

Users can zoom in to show problem areas within one country or zoom out to view the entire region. The program calculates sources of emissions and depicts how pollution travels between regions and across country borders.

It also analyses the impact of acid deposition on ecosystems, presents a range of options to reduce or eliminate pollution and provides associated costs.

Acid rain, a danger most countries face because of rapid industrialisation, is a product of chemical reactions between airborne pollution (sulfur and nitrogen compounds) and atmospheric water and oxygen. Once in the atmosphere, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides react with other chemicals to form sulfuric and nitric acids.

These substances can stay in the atmosphere for several days and travel hundreds or thousands of kilometres before falling to the earths surface as acid rain.

This process is more accurately termed acid deposition because acidity can travel to the earths surface in many forms: rains, snow, fog, dew, particles or aerosol gases.

Documented effects of acid deposition include forest decline, damage to crops and aquatic ecosystems, increased erosion of monuments and buildings and adverse effects on human health.

Sulfur dioxide emissions, a critical component of acid rain, in the Asian region will surpass emissions in North America, and Europe combined by 2010, if current trends continue, a World Bank study says.

The World Bank study titled Rains Asia an assessment model for acid deposition in Asia describes the program and its far-reaching applications as a tool for policy-makers, scientists, engineers, educators and the general public to seek solutions to the problem of acid rain in Asia.