Stay on target
Two months after NASA released a giant balloon into the stratosphere to observe rare polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs), scientists are beginning to analyze the results.
Photos collected during the five-day mission could help us better understand turbulence in the atmosphere, oceans, and lakes, and may improve weather forecasting.
PMCs, also known as noctilucent clouds, form 50 miles above Earth’s poles, coalescing as ice crystals on tiny meteor remnants in the upper atmosphere. Their bright blue or white glow is visible just after sunset in polar regions during the summer.
In early July, NASA launched the PMC Turbo mission, which saw the balloon float from Esrange, Sweden, across the Arctic, to Western Nunavut, Canada. On-board cameras captured 6 million high-resolution images (120 terabytes of data), which scientists are now combing through.
“From what we’ve seen so far, we expect to have a really spectacular dataset from this mission,” Dave Fritts, PMC Turbo principal investigator at Global Atmospheric Technologies and Sciences, said in a statement. “Our cameras were likely able to capture some really interesting events and we hope will provide new insights into these complex dynamics.”
These clouds, according to NASA, are extremely sensitive to environmental factors like water vapor and temperature. So natural motions like airflow over mountains and thunderstorms can easily disturb the atmosphere and cause gravity waves—which lead to turbulence, which influences weather and climate.
Though invisible to the naked eye, gravity waves can be seen as they move through PMCs.
“This is the first time we’ve been able to visualize the flow of energy from larger gravity waves to smaller flow instabilities and turbulence in the upper atmosphere,” Fritts said. “At these altitudes you can literally see the gravity waves breaking—like ocean waves on the beach—and cascading to turbulence.”
PMC Turbo’s seven specially designed imaging systems—each with high-resolution cameras, computer controls and communications systems, and 32 TB of data storage—create a mosaic of wide views extending 100 miles across and narrow views as small as 20 yards wide.
Additional information can be extracted from laser radar (lidar) measurements of the precise altitudes of PMCs and temperature fluctuations of gravity waves.
UK mobile provider EE last year announced plans to use high-flying balloons and drones to connect rural communities. Meanwhile, scientists recently suggested that dumping huge amounts of salt into the upper atmosphere could lessen the effects of climate change. Keep up with all things NASA here.
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