Rochester plays host to acid rain conference

Acid rain can leave lakes without fish and soil without nutrients.

It has had a devastating effect — most notably in the Adirondacks during the 1960s and 1970s — that environmental laws and regulations have begun to bring under control. But acid rain, worldwide, has become more pronounced in rapidly industrialized nations, such as China.

This past week, about 340 scientists and government officials gathered in Rochester for the Acid Rain 2015 conference to learn about the latest trends and exchange information. Participants came from five continents for the five-day conference, which concluded Friday at the Joseph A. Floreano Riverside Convention Center.

Keynote addresses included presentations about acid rain in the United States and abroad.

"It's still a problem — in the Northeast more than it should be, but it's much better than it used to be," said David Gay, program coordinator of the National Atmospheric Deposition Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The Acid Rain 2015 conference was the ninth such gathering held by this network of scientists and researchers, who have met every five years since 1975.

Rochester was chosen as the site for this international gathering because organizers wanted to meet in the same state as the Adirondacks, where a lot of research on acid rain has been conducted.

The major culprit in acid rain is pollution from burning fossil fuels.

Gay, who was a coordinator of this year's conference, said that with the greater reliance on coal-burning power plants, especially in the Ohio River Valley, large amounts of sulfur dioxide have been produced and carried by winds from the west to Eastern states. This pollutant as well as nitrogen oxides react with water to produce acids.

The American public focused on acid rain during the 1960s. Gene Likens, a scientist, did field work in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Some of his first samples back then were 100 times as acidic as unpolluted rain.

With high acidic levels, about 15 percent of the lakes in the Adirondacks were without fish, said Doug Burns another organizer of the conference and a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Troy, Rensselaer County.

"It creates an environment that they are not suited to live," added Gay.

Scrubbers on smokestacks on power plants are among the ways emissions of sulfur dioxide have been curbed, but Burns added: "The recovery of the eco-system has been very slow."

One of the keynote speakers, Lei Duan, a professor at the School of Environment at Tshinghua University, in Beijing, China, told of his nation's experience with acid rain.

He oversees several monitoring sites and does regional surveys on acidification and nitrogen cycling.

JGOODMAN@Gannett.com