Stanford Scientists Track Tiny Atmospheric Ripples Using Data from Internet-Beaming Balloons
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Stanford scientists track tiny atmospheric ripples using data from internet-beaming balloons:
Giant balloons launched into the stratosphere to beam internet service to Earth have helped scientists measure tiny ripples in our upper atmosphere, uncovering patterns that could improve weather forecasts and climate models.
The ripples, known as gravity waves or buoyancy waves, emerge when blobs of air are forced upward and then pulled down by gravity. Imagine a parcel of air that rushes over mountains, plunges toward cool valleys, shuttles across land and sea and ricochets off growing storms, bobbing up and down between layers of stable atmosphere in a great tug of war between buoyancy and gravity. A single wave can travel for thousands of miles, carrying momentum and heat along the way.
[...] Published Aug. 30 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, the new research draws on superpressure balloon data from the company Loon LLC, which designed the balloons to provide internet access to areas underserved by cell towers or fiber-optic cables. Spun out of Google parent company Alphabet in 2018, Loon has sent thousands of sensor-laden balloons sailing 12 miles up in the stratosphere - well above the altitude of commercial planes and most clouds - for 100 days or more at a stretch.
[...] The Loon data proved particularly valuable for calculating high-frequency gravity waves, which can rise and fall hundreds of times in a day, over distances ranging from a few hundred feet to hundreds of miles. They're tiny and they change on timescales of minutes. But in an integrated sense, they affect, for instance, the momentum budget of the jet stream, which is this massive planetary scale thing that interacts with storms and plays an important role in setting their course," Sheshadri said.
Journal Reference:
Erik A. Lindgren, Aditi Sheshadri, Aurelien Podglajen, et al. Seasonal and Latitudinal Variability of the Gravity Wave Spectrum in the Lower Stratosphere, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (DOI: 10.1029/2020JD032850)
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