Atmospheric

Picture a tree in the forest. The tree "inhales" carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, transforming that greenhouse gas into the building materials and energy it needs to grow its branches and leaves.  By removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the tree serves as an indispensable "sink," or warehouse, for carbon that, in tandem with Earth's other trees, plants and the ocean, helps reduce rising levels of carbon dioxide in the air that contribute to global warming.  Each year, humans release more than 30-billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the burning of…

Half a mile underground is probably the last place you might expect to be able to observe atmospheric phenomena. If you knew about the MINOS experiment, however, you might think otherwise. MINOS, which stands for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, was built to detect particles originating far away but of terrestrial origin. Recently, researchers have noticed that the detectors at MINOS occasionally detect particles from the atmosphere, and that these detections correlate with weather patterns in the high atmosphere. MINOS was designed to study neutrinos - exotic particles that rarely…

Cosmic-rays detected half a mile underground in a disused U.S. iron-mine can be used to detect major weather events occurring 20 miles up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters and led by scientists from the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).   The study shows how the number of high-energy cosmic-rays reaching a detector deep underground, closely matches temperature measurements in the upper atmosphere (known as the stratosphere). For the first time,…

Climate prediction is difficult stuff.   As you know, it's impossible to predict the weather 10 days from now much less six months and aside from "it will get a lot worse" no one can say with any degree of certainty what Earth's climate could look like in the future given changing kinds of pollution conditions and nature itself. More aerosol research would help, according to a NASA-led report issued by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program on Friday.   Aerosols are suspended solid or liquid particles in the air that often are visible as dust, smoke and haze.   On a global…

Never 'heard' of thundersnow?  It's a rare sort of thunderstorm but the precipitation is snow rather than rain and because the snow dampens the sound so while you might  thunder from a typical storm miles away  the boom of thundersnow can only be heard for a few hundred yards. Patrick Market, associate professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri, is chasing storms in the dead of winter in order to release weather balloons that will produce data about the little-known phenomenon of thundersnow and he says it can teach us a lot about predicting weather. Market…

I have a list of jerks already lined up for powering a space elevator, putting them in mortal danger of dying a painful death by plummeting elevator. Carefully Timed Jerks Could Power Space Elevator Disorganized jerks and procrastinating jerks need not apply. The BBC article continues: The prospects for the space elevator have been shaken up with a simple prototype using a broomstick. The project could see a 100,000 km long tether anchored to the Earth as a "lift into space" for cheaper space missions. While the approach could solve one of the idea's great technical hurdles, many issues…

Big volcanic eruptions over the past 450 years have temporarily cooled weather in the tropics but suggest that such effects may have been masked in the 20th century by rising global temperatures, say researchers. The  paper, which shows that higher latitudes can be even more sensitive to volcanism, appears in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.  Scientists already agree that large eruptions have lowered temperatures at higher latitudes in recent centuries, because volcanic particles reflect sunlight back into space. For instance, 1816, the year following the massive Tambora…

Tangerine skies.. Tangerine blossoms, so I thought while wearing my tangerine trench coat in the Netherlands. I had no idea how much the Dutch would be attracted to me ... for my coat. I learned soon that they favor 'that color' because of the Orange Family. My face lit up with "but you don't even have orange groves here."   The Prince of Orange, Prins van Oranje in Dutch, is scheduled to become the king of Holland on 30 April 2009. He is supposed to be an expert in Climate Change. His biography brings up Willem-Alexander Claus George Ferdinand's interest in international water…

An ice core drilled at the Belukha glacier in the Siberian Altai by a Swiss-Russian research team under the leadership of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in 2001 has now provided new findings in climate research. Oxygen isotopes in the ice were used to reconstruct the temperatures in the Altai over the past 750 years. The scientists discovered a strong link between regional temperatures and the solar activity in the period 1250-1850, concluding that the sun was an important driver of preindustrial temperature changes in the Altai. The observation that the reconstructed temperatures followed…

An experiment, carried out from a stratospheric balloon floating 35 km above the Brazilian jungle, to validate one of the instruments operating on the meteorological satellite MetOp was also used to support preparations for the candidate Earth Explorer TRAQ mission. TRAQ (Tropospheric composition and Air Quality) is one of the six candidate Earth Explorer missions that has just completed assessment study. This mission concept, along with the other five, will be presented to the science community at a User Consultation Meeting in January 2009. Up to three missions will subsequently be…