HAMPTON -- Every day, direct sunlight heats the earth and that heat is released at night. How much radiation reaches the planet and the amount that gets trapped in the atmosphere varies by location, depending on the gases and aerosols or tiny particles in the air.

Rich Ferrare, a senior researcher with NASA Langley, is studying how that's affecting the arctic.

"What NASA was trying to do was look at the effects of anthropogenic, or man-made pollution, as well as forest fire smoke on the atmosphere in the arctic -- looking at the balance of radiation.  How does the solar radiation change as a result of all these pollutants being put into the atmosphere?," he explains.

Video: Researchers study pollution's effects

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Ferrare has seen the impact of artic haze.

"We've seen this accelerating change with the ice melt and so on that is going on in the artic," he notes.

With changes elsewhere on Earth, researchers are working to improve their climate forecasts to help determine whether similar changes are happening in Virginia.

The crew from NASA Langley flew 18 missions out of Barrow, Alaska.

A NASA research plane along with four others measured haze in the Artic atmosphere. A laser radar identified where the haze was while other researchers were able to determine it came from wildfires in Siberia and pollution along the U.S. East Coast.

The work helps validate data from the CALIPSO Satellite, which has been scanning the skies for aerosols and thin clouds since its launch in 2006.

The findings are essential to improving climate predicting models, as research scientist Chris Hostetler explains.

"The idea is to improve our models that we use to understand climate change because only models are going to allow us to predict future climate change."