news, journals and articles from all over the world.
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.
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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.
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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.
Read moreNew 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.
Read moreThe 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.
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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.
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