Kurashi - News From Japan

If you follow car news, or wonder about the future of mobility - and/or care about the air we breathe, well, then you must have noticed that Volkswagen was caught on September 3 by the biggest story ever. Diesel cars use engines that are pretty powerful on less fuel compared to gasoline, but they also have more emissions of CO2 and worse, the Nitrogen compounds known as NOx. These combine on hot summer days to form smog and ozone and really bad stuff that will actually kill people. So for a long time, diesel has had a bad rap, so to speak. Then car manufacturers tried to remedy that by introducing all kinds of systems to clean the exhaust. Except, due to the terrific work by a small NGO in the US with just a staff of 25 or so people, it was revealed that Volkswagen had put a computer program algorithm in its engines, that could detect if the car was being tested or not. In other words, if a test was going on, switch on the system to clean up the exhaust, and emit less NOx and o...

If you have allergies, the SPRINTARS page may help you to prepare for your daily tasks. Red alert means severe warning Orange means pretty bad Green means yaya, a little bad Blue means OK... Sunday was severe in many places, including Tohoku and Kyushu. But Monday should be OK. SPRINTARS Forecast (J) The aerosol forecast is based on the simulation with a global aerosol climate model, SPRINTARS (E). Their movies are rather interesting too, here . Here is the link to their daily forecasts: http://sprintars.riam.kyushu-u.ac.jp/forecastj.html SPRINTARS also do video forecasts of pollutants. Try this link . Wow, China really gets it bad. SPRINTARS is based on an atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, MIROC, developed by Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute (Division of Climate System Research), University of Tokyo , National Institute fot Environmental Studies , and Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (Research Institute for Global Change) , ...