Atmospheric

Using data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft and two telescopes on or near Earth, an international team of scientists has found that one of the solar system’s largest and newest storms – Jupiter’s Little Red Spot – has some of the highest wind speeds ever detected on any planet. Jupiter’s "LRS" is an anticyclone, a storm whose winds circulate in the opposite direction to that of a cyclone – counterclockwise, in this case. It is nearly the size of Earth and as red as the similar, but larger and more well known, Great Red Spot (GRS). The dramatic evolution of the LRS began with the merger of…

Greenhouse gases are not all bad. With 90,000 out of every 100,000 years in the planet's history being ice ages, greenhouse gases are absolutely necessary for maintaining the climate we enjoy. In the absence of greenhouse gases like water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, etc, the average temperature on earth would be -18°C - pretty darn cold and basically unable to sustain life. However, there can be too much of a good thing. The concentration and composition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has fluctuated throughout history but has been climbing more recently due to human activity…

Methane, a greenhouse gas with an impact over 20 times greater than CO2, is constantly seeping out of large methane hydrate reservoirs in the ocean floors but 80 percent of it is immediately consumed by syntrophic ("feeding together") microorganisms. These microorganisms dramatically reduce the oceanic emission of methane into the atmosphere by oxidizing methane anaerobically, providing an important component of the global carbon cycle and a major sink for methane on Earth. Scientists of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig and the California Institute of…

Fallow agricultural land and steppe-formation processes are evidently capable of having a much greater effect on global air quality than was previously assumed, according to researchers who examined a dust cloud that formed over parched fields in southern Ukraine and led to extremely high concentrations of particulate matter in Central Europe. Over two-thirds of the land area in the Ukraine consists of fields and meadows. The soil on 220,000 square kilometres is regarded as being under threat. Since the 1930s wind erosion in what was then the Soviet Union has increased considerably as a…

Scientists at Gramina, a joint biotech venture by Australia’s Molecular Plant Breeding Cooperative Research Centre and New Zealand rural services group PGG Wrightson Genomics, are developing a grass that will not only cut the amount of methane cows burp up when chewing the cud but will also grow in hotter climes, according to the latest issue of Chemistry & Industry. This means that farmers should be able to maintain dairy herds’ productivity and profitability in the face of a changing climate, while cutting down their gaseous burps and reducing their contribution to global warming.…

Fewer caribou calves are being born and more of them are dying in West Greenland as a result of a warming climate, according to Eric Post, a Penn State associate professor of biology. Post, who believes that caribou may serve as an indicator species for climate changes including global warming, based his conclusions on data showing that the timing of peak food availability no longer corresponds to the timing of caribou births. Caribou -- which are closely related to wild reindeer -- are dependent on plants for all their energy and nutrients. Throughout the long Arctic winter, when there is…

Are climate change and carbon emissions inextricably linked? New research published in Carbon Balance and Management suggests that this may not be the case, although it may be some time before we reach this saturation point. The land and the oceans contain significantly more carbon than the atmosphere, and exchange carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 emissions absorbed by the land or the oceans vary in response to changes in climate (including natural variations such as El Nino or volcanic eruptions). So current theories suggest that climate change will have a feedback…

An international team of scientists has detected that some of the glow of Earth’s aurora is polarized, an unexpected state for such emissions. Measurements of this newfound polarization in the Northern Lights may provide scientists with fresh insights into the composition of Earth’s upper atmosphere, the configuration of its magnetic field, and the energies of particles from the Sun, the researchers say. If observed on other planets, the phenomenon might also give clues to the shape of the Sun’s magnetic field as it curls around other bodies in the solar system. When a beam of light is…

Monitoring Earth's rising greenhouse gas levels will require a global data collection network 10 times larger than the one currently in place in order to quantify regional progress in emission reductions, according to a new research commentary by University of Colorado and NOAA researchers appearing in the April 25 issue of Science. The authors, CU-Boulder Research Associate Melinda Marquis and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist Pieter Tans, said with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations now at 385 parts per million and rising, the need for improved regional…

In 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru put a large amount of sulfur into the atmosphere. Sulfur reacts with water in the air to form droplets of sulfuric acid, which cool the planet by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface. The droplets soon fall back to Earth, so the cooling effects lasted only a year or so, but the global impact on human society was much greater, according to a new study of contemporary records by geologists at UC Davis. N o one had looked at the agricultural and social impacts, said Ken Verosub, professor of geology at UC Davis. "We knew it was…