Art & Science, again

An 1829 landscape by J. M. W. Turner that researchers analyzed for its sunset./ New York Times

This neat little article in the NYT Science Times describes how scientists are evaluating hundreds of digital images of landscape paintings from 1500 and 2000; an era that included 50 large volcanic eruptions.  They are analyzing the green-to-red ration along the horizons to estimate the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere at the time.

After the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815 "you see that in this specific year he [Turner] starts painting sunsets a little more reddish, compared to two or three years before.”