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UrduAn Australian physicist has solved a 50-year conundrum that has baffled the world’s best science minds – why lightning zigzags.
Tag: Clouds
The lightness of water vapor adds heft to global climate models
Clouds are notoriously hard to pin down, especially in climate science.
Observations show marine clouds amplify global warming
A new analysis of satellite cloud observations finds that global warming causes low-level clouds over the oceans to decrease, leading to further warming. The work, led by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in collaboration with colleagues from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the NASA Langley Research Center.
Probing Wet Fire Smoke in Clouds: Can Water Intensify the Earth’s Warming?
A first-of-its-kind instrument that samples smoke from megafires and scans humidity will help researchers better understand the scale and long-term impact of fires—specifically how far and high the smoke will travel, when and where it will rain, and whether the wet smoke will warm the climate by absorbing sunlight.
Explosive Origins of ‘Secondary’ Ice—and Snow
Where does snow come from? This may seem like a simple question to ponder as half the planet emerges from a season of watching whimsical flakes fall from the sky–and shoveling them from driveways. But a new study on how water becomes ice in slightly supercooled Arctic clouds may make you rethink the simplicity of the fluffy stuff. It describes definitive, real-world evidence for “freezing fragmentation” of drizzle as a major source of ice in slightly supercooled clouds. The findings have important implications for forecasting weather and climate.
Bacteria and Algae Get Rides in Clouds
Human health and ecosystems could be affected by microbes including cyanobacteria and algae that hitch rides in clouds and enter soil, lakes, oceans and other environments when it rains, according to a Rutgers co-authored study.
Tiny Particles that Seed Clouds Can Form from Trace Gases Over Open Sea
New results from an atmospheric study over the Eastern North Atlantic reveal that tiny aerosol particles that seed the formation of clouds can form out of next to nothingness over the open ocean. Understanding the process will improve how aerosols and clouds are represented in models that describe Earth’s climate.
Cracks in Arctic sea ice turn low clouds on and off
The prevailing view has been that more leads are associated with more low-level clouds during winter. But University of Utah atmospheric scientists noticed something strange in their study of these leads: when lead occurrence was greater, there were fewer, not more clouds.
Scientists Prepare Ship for Mission Locked in Arctic Ice
The German icebreaker RV Polarstern is scheduled to set sail today from Tromsø, Norway, for a 13-month journey to wherever the sea ice takes it. In a week or so, the ship will get locked into the Arctic ice and drift with the ice floes for a year so that scientists can gather unprecedented data about the Arctic climate.