clouds, coral bleaching, new tech
It might sound like science fiction, but “marine cloud brightening” is being seriously considered as a way to shield parts of the ocean from extreme heat. We’re using water cannons to spray seawater into the sky. This causes brighter, whiter clouds to form. These low marine clouds reflect sunlight away from the ocean’s surface, protecting ...
You may see a cloud every time you gaze up into the sky. Generally, when water condenses in the atmosphere, clouds will form. A cloud is comprised of many tiny water droplets and other elements floating in the air. And as they get dense and saturated with these droplets, they spill forth rain onto the ...
Atmospheric aerosols scatter and absorb solar light, and influence the formation of clouds. However, these processes are not yet completely understood, which leads to significant uncertainties when estimating their role in climate change. In order to reliably estimate the effect of humans on climate change, we need to be able to separate the effects of ...
One of the great puzzles of modern space science is neatly summed up by the view from NASA’s Perseverance, which just landed on Mars. Today, it’s a desert planet, and yet the rover is sitting right next to an ancient river delta. The apparent contradiction has puzzled scientists for decades, especially because at the same ...
Cloud formations can sometimes share a resemblance to some objects in the world. Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds are one such type of cloud — they look like ocean waves. These are named after two 19th-century scientists who devoted their time to learning about them. Wave clouds The two scientists, Hermann von Helmholtz and Lord Kelvin, studied how ...
Though it looks like it to us, clouds on Jupiter do not form a flat surface. Some of Jupiter’s clouds rise up above the surrounding cloud tops. The two bright spots in the right-center of this image are much higher than the surrounding clouds. Jupiter’s clouds extend deep into the planet Jupiter’s atmosphere is a ...
Led by Swansea University’s Tree Ring Research Group, researchers from Sweden, Finland, and Norway analyzed the information contained in the rings of ancient pine trees from northern Scandinavia to reveal how clouds have reduced the impact of natural phases of warmth in the past. Clouds are doing so again now to moderate the warming caused ...