The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released an entrancing orbital view of "cloud streets" streaming away from the south Florida coast on Feb. 1, as freezing air surged southwards into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic ocean.

What am I seeing?

Cloud streets have been known to form when cold air passes over warmer water, absorbing moisture from the waves below to create parallel belts of low-level clouds, which often align with the prevailing wind, according to NOAA.

The mesmerizing cloud formations occurred as Floridians endured some of the coldest temperatures of recent years, with the city of Tampa on the western coast of the peninsula reporting a freezing 30 degrees Fahrenheit (-1 degrees Celsius).

An orbital timelapse of the cloud streets (above) gives the impression of water churning in the wake of a speeding boat. A clear stretch of water can also be seen following the line of the coast, indicating regions of dry air that had yet to absorb enough moisture to manifest the spectacular clouds.

What captured the picture?

The cloud streets were captured by the Advanced Baseline Imager instrument mounted on NOAA's GOES-19 weather satellite, as it orbited 22,236 miles (35,785 kilometers) above Earth's equator.

GOES-19 launched on June 25, 2024 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida before establishing itself in a geostationary orbit, where it travels at a height and velocity that perfectly matches Earth's rate of rotation. As a result, it always has the same view of Earth, which encompasses the Americas and Canada, along with a host of other nations.

The satellite is equipped with instruments that allow it to track terrestrial weather and potential environmental hazards, including the oceanic conditions that give rise to powerful hurricanes. GOES-19 is also armed with tools geared towards monitoring the sun and the space weather environment, which can impact life on Earth and the health of orbiting spacecraft.

Check out our explainer article on the different kinds of clouds and how they form to find out more!

Have you ever found yourself glancing out a window or driving home on a winter's evening, only to be stopped in your tracks by a sky awash with vivid pinks, fiery oranges and soft golds like something lifted straight from a painting? Or maybe you're an early bird who has caught a breathtaking sunrise as the dawn chorus welcomes a brisk new winter's day.

So are sunrises and sunsets really more spectacular in winter, or do we simply notice them more when our daily routines line up better with the beginning and end of daylight?

The answer lies somewhere between science and perception. From the way sunlight travels through Earth's atmosphere to the seasonal changes in air quality and the sun's lower path across the sky, winter can create conditions that favor more dramatic colors in the sky. At the same time, shorter days mean we're simply more likely to be around to see them. But what is really going on? Let's take a look at what's going on above our heads.

Winter light looks different

The colors we see at sunrise and sunset depend on how sunlight interacts with Earth's atmosphere. Sunlight contains every color in the spectrum, but as it travels through the atmosphere, tiny air molecules (mostly nitrogen and oxygen) collide with it, scattering the shorter-wavelength blue and violet light much more effectively than the longer-wavelength reds and oranges. This process, known as Raleigh scattering, is why the daytime sky looks blue but the sky around sunrise and sunset turns warming shades of red and orange when the sun is low in the sky, according to the U.K. Met Office.

During the winter, the sun's path stays lower above the horizon than in summer, meaning sunlight has to travel through more of the atmosphere before it reaches your eyes. More atmosphere means more chances for shorter wavelengths of light to scatter away, and we just see what's left — the longer wavelengths of red and orange.

The role of colder, drier air

Seasonal changes in the atmosphere can also affect how colorful sunrises and sunsets appear.

One important factor is humidity. Warmer air typically holds more water vapor. Tiny water droplets can scatter light, washing out the vivid reds and oranges. In winter, especially in colder climates, the air tends to be drier and less humid, meaning there is less water vapor to diffuse the incoming sunlight. In those conditions, the longer-wavelength reds and oranges that remain after blue light is scattered can appear crisper and more vibrant.

Another factor is air quality. After a rain or snowstorm clears dust and pollution from the lower atmosphere, the sky can be significantly "cleaner". With fewer large particles to scatter light indiscriminately, the colors that reach your eyes can appear richer.

Do winter sunrises and sunsets last longer?

Winter sunrises and sunsets can also appear more spectacular because we simply have longer to soak them in. Because Earth's axis is tilted by about 23.5 degrees, the sun moves to different locations in the sky in different seasons, and follows a shallower arc through the sky during the winter. This means the sun spends more time near the horizon at both sunrise and sunset than it does in summer. The longer horizon-hugging bath gives those warm hues more time to develop and persist across a broader swath of sky.

Or do we simply notice them more?

Perhaps winter sunrises and sunsets appear to feel more spectacular simply because we see them more.

In summer, sunrise often happens while many of us are still asleep and evening sunsets can occur well after the workday is over. But in winter, sunrise and sunset tend to fall squarely within typical waking hours, particularly around commutes to and from work or school. This timing alone increases the chances we're going to be looking out a window, in a car, or walking home just when the sky is at its very best.

In the end, there's no single reason winter sunrises and sunsets can look so spectacular. When low angles of the sun, atmospheric conditions and timing line up, they can deliver truly striking displays and in winter, and more of us are awake to catch them.

This article was originally published at Eos. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Americans set few everyday expectations for science, but they are fundamental: We expect the weather forecast to be right, we expect science and technology that allow weather hazards to be anticipated within reason, and we expect public services to protect our lives and livelihoods from such hazards—floods, fires, tornadoes, and hurricanes.

Well, the fulfillment of those expectations is in real doubt now that the Trump administration plans to dismantle the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a federally funded institution that underpins critical science that Americans rely on. Administration officials have argued that NCAR's work can simply be redistributed to other institutions without loss. But NCAR is not just another research center. It is purpose-built critical infrastructure designed to integrate observations, modeling, supercomputing, and applied research in ways that no single university, agency, or contractor can replicate on its own.

Although Congress rejected the administration's proposed funding cuts to NSF, the most recent spending bill did not include explicit language protecting NCAR as a unified entity.

As a result, the center remains vulnerable—not through outright defunding, but through fragmentation. The administration could try to cut interagency contracts that NCAR relies on to fund its staff, lay off staff, and relocate critical capabilities. NSF has already outlined plans to restructure NCAR, including moving its supercomputer to another site and transferring or divesting research aircraft it operates. These risks would hollow out the institution itself, breaking apart integrated teams, disrupting continuity in projects, and weakening the unique collaborative model at NCAR that accelerates scientific progress in weather, water, climate, and space weather.

This distinction matters. NCAR's value does not lie solely in the science it produces, but in how that science is organized, sustained, and shared across the nation.

The following are five of the many ways Americans will lose the benefits of scientific research if plans to dismantle NCAR unfold, and two ways we can work to prevent it.

1. Air travelers will lose protection

Every day, millions of Americans board airplanes expecting to arrive safely at their destinations. What most passengers never see is the science working behind the scenes to keep flights safe through better understanding of atmospheric conditions such as turbulence and microburst winds.

Turbulence alone is the leading cause of injuries on U.S. commercial flights and cargo operations, and NCAR research has played a central role in reducing that risk by improving how turbulence is detected, predicted, and avoided. NCAR scientists helped develop advanced forecasting techniques that allow pilots and dispatchers to reroute aircraft away from dangerous air currents before passengers are ever put at risk.

In addition to safety, NCAR research has reduced the $100 million financial strain severe turbulence costs the U.S. aviation system every year through aircraft damage, inspections, medical costs, and delays.

NCAR's contributions to aviation safety extend well beyond turbulence. In the 1970s and 1980s, NCAR scientists led research that identified and explained microbursts, a poorly understood weather phenomenon consisting of powerful downdraft winds produced by thunderstorms. Microbursts had caused multiple fatal airline crashes during takeoff and landing, and NCAR findings convinced the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and international aviation authorities to develop radar warning systems to detect these threats. Since these tools have been deployed, fatal U.S. airline crashes caused by microbursts have effectively been eliminated.

Dismantling NCAR and moving this work elsewhere would break the integrated system that makes aviation safety research effective in the first place. NCAR uniquely brings together long-term observational data, advanced modeling, specialized instrumentation, and direct operational partnerships with agencies like the FAA under one roof. Fragmenting that capacity across multiple institutions would disrupt decades of trusted, public service relationships with the aviation community, making it harder and slower to translate research into real-world protections for pilots and passengers. With millions of people in the sky every day, this is not a risk we should take.

2. Food security and the U.S. agricultural economy will be put at risk

Agriculture contributes hundreds of billions of dollars annually to the U.S. economy, and food security remains a national priority, making NCAR's research crucial to this weather-sensitive sector. Drought, heat waves, and floods are recurring stresses that affect what crops farmers can grow, as well as food prices for consumers.

NCAR research is directly relevant to food security. For example, NCAR scientists are working in conjunction with universities in Kansas and Nebraska and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop CropSmart, a next-generation system that aggregates weather forecasts, crop data, soil conditions, and other inputs into actionable, decision-ready information for farmers, agribusinesses, and agricultural officials. Early projections from CropSmart suggest that if advanced decision support systems like this were adopted on even half of irrigated farms in a state like Nebraska, farmers could save up to 1 billion cubic meters of water and $100 million in irrigation energy costs annually while also cutting about a million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year.

If NCAR is broken up, we lose this economic opportunity and the myriad ways it supports U.S. agriculture. NCAR's long-standing collaborations, integrated modeling and computing capacity, and role as a trusted public service institution are what allow farmers to rely on consistent, decision-ready information year after year.

All the agricultural tools housed, supported, or innovated by NCAR would be put at risk, leaving farmers with fewer early warnings, less reliable guidance, and greater exposure to weather extremes. These losses would translate to the food on our tables having a higher price tag, which inevitably increases food insecurity, already a significant problem in the United States.

3. U.S. national security and military readiness will be weakened

The U.S. military depends on weather and climate intelligence to operate safely, effectively, and strategically. From flight operations and naval deployments to training exercises and base infrastructure, weather conditions shape nearly every aspect of defense readiness. When forecasts are wrong or incomplete, missions can be delayed, equipment can be damaged, and personnel and our national defense are put at risk.

NCAR's research and operational tools provide the environmental intelligence that defense planners, operators, and test authorities rely on to keep us safe. Accurate, NCAR-enhanced forecasts have saved the U.S. Army millions of dollars by reducing weather-related test cancellations and avoiding needless mobilization costs. NCAR weather forecasting tools have been used for defense-related purposes, including anti-terrorism support at the Olympic games, protection of the Pentagon, support for firefighters, and analysis of exposure of our military personnel to toxins.

The strategic value of this work is reflected in the breadth of defense agencies that rely on NCAR today. NCAR maintains active partnerships and contracts with the Air Force, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Ground Intelligence Center, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Army Test and Evaluation Command. These relationships exist for a simple reason: Accurate environmental intelligence reduces risk, lowers costs, and strengthens national security.

Dismantling NCAR is a national security threat. Defense agencies rely on specialized, mission-critical environmental products and expertise that are developed, maintained, and refined through streamlined, long-standing relationships with NCAR scientists. These capabilities cannot be replaced quickly without disruption, and even short gaps in trusted weather and environmental intelligence would increase operational risk for current and future missions. Protecting NCAR is an investment in military readiness, operational efficiency, and the safety of those who serve.

4. Americans in disaster-prone areas will have less time to prepare for, and evacuate from, extreme weather

Since 1980, weather hazards have cost the United States thousands of lives and more than $3.1 trillion. In 2025 alone, disasters cost nearly 300 lives and $115 billion in damages to homes and businesses. And these weather hazards are expected to worsen because of our changing climate.

A 2010 study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that public weather forecasts and warnings deliver roughly $31.5 billion in annual economic benefits in the United States. These gains in preparedness and economic benefit would not have been possible without sustained scientific research from NCAR.

Hurricane forecasting provides a clear example of how NCAR research has secured the safety and mitigated the economic losses of residents and businesses. Since 1980, hurricanes have caused nearly $3 trillion in damages in the United States.

For decades, NCAR scientists have worked to develop and refine instruments and methods to collect real-time hurricane observations and improve our understanding of storm behavior. By the 1980s, data and modeling advances emerging from NCAR research were being used operationally by NOAA, contributing to a roughly 20%–30% improvement in the accuracy of hurricane track forecasts compared to earlier decades.

NCAR continues to enhance forecasting capabilities for hurricanes, as well as their associated flood risks, through the center's sophisticated flood risk model. Today, the model is used operationally by the National Weather Service in more than 3,800 locations serving 3 million people.

If NCAR's role in advancing forecast science is weakened by dismantling it, these gains in disaster preparedness will be put in jeopardy. Forecast improvements do not happen automatically; they require sustained research, coordination, and testing. If NCAR’s research capabilities to develop and improve weather forecasting disappear, the United States will face a major public safety risk.

5. Americans lose a unique source of national pride

NCAR was never designed to serve a select few. It was built with public investment to serve the nation as a whole. From its founding, NCAR embraced the idea that understanding the Earth system—its atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice—requires collaboration across institutions, disciplines, and generations, not isolated efforts working in parallel.

That collaborative model is embedded in how NCAR operates. It is stewarded by a consortium of more than 120 colleges and universities across the United States, representing a wide range of regions, institutional types, and scientific strengths. This structure allows knowledge, tools, and expertise to flow across the country, connecting large research universities with smaller institutions, federal agencies with academic scientists, and fundamental research with real-world applications for the public and private sectors. The result is a shared national capability that no single institution could sustain on its own.

There is something deeply American in that collaborative vision, a belief that publicly funded science should be openly shared, collectively advanced, and used to strengthen the common good. NCAR represents what is possible when a nation chooses to invest in science as a public good.

For more than 6 decades, NCAR has shown that open, collaborative science can save lives, support economic resilience and national defense, and expand opportunity across generations. Preserving and celebrating NCAR are choosing a future where shared knowledge, innovation, and public-serving science continue to thrive.

What we must do now

This moment demands more than concern—it requires action.

First, NSF is requesting feedback regarding its intent to restructure NCAR. Feedback "will be used to inform NSF's future actions with respect to the components of NCAR and to ensure the products, services, and tools provided in the future align with the needs and expectations of stakeholders to the extent practicable."

Respond, and inform NSF about the value and benefits of all of NCAR, not only its constituent parts. Readers can submit comments through 13 March.

Second, Congress ultimately holds the authority to fund and protect NCAR, and lawmakers need to hear clearly that dismantling it would put the health, safety, and financial stability of Americans at risk. By October 2026, Congress will address the funding of NSF for next year; we must actively and consistently reach out to our congressional representatives now and throughout the year.

Readers can contact their members of Congress through easy-to-use resources provided by AGU and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

For a split second over northern Italy, the night sky erupted with a colossal glowing red ring. One photographer was in the right place at the right time.

Valter Binotto captured the eerie flash above the foothills of the Italian Alps from his home in the small town of Possagno on Nov. 17. The strange red ring is an "elve," a rare and almost impossibly fast form of upper atmospheric lightning that most people will never see.

Elves are rapidly expanding disk-shaped flashes that can grow up to 300 miles (480 kilometers) across and last for less than a thousandth of a second, according to NOAA. They occur high above thunderstorms when a powerful electromagnetic pulse shoots upward into the ionosphere, the same ionized region of Earth's upper atmosphere where auroras form.

Binotto had originally set out to try and photograph sprites, brief electrical discharges above thunderstorms that occur in the upper atmosphere, so he focused on a thunderstorm that had fewer clouds. "I didn't capture any sprites, but fortunately, I managed to capture this Elve!" Binotto told Space.com in an email. He used a Sony A7S with a 20 mm f/1.8 lens at ISO 51,200. The photo is a frame taken from a video recorded at 25 fps.

"The ELVE was generated by a powerful negative lightning strike in a storm in Vernazza about 300 km south of me," Binotto told Spaceweather.com. One bolt reached an extraordinary -303 kilo-ampères (the minus sign indicates the lightning's polarity, not that the current was less than zero), producing an intense electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that lit up the ionosphere. For comparison, normal lightning typically carries just 10 to 30 kilo-ampères of current. This elve hovered about 100 miles (160 km) above Earth's surface and spanned roughly 200 miles (320 km) in diameter, according to Spaceweather.com.

This isn't the first time Binotto has photographed the eerie phenomenon. He captured an even more dramatic elve on March 23, 2023, also from his home in Possagno. The image shows the structure in even more remarkable detail as the red halo expanded across the sky.

Editor's Note: If you snap an interesting Earth or space photo and would like to share it with Space.com's readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

Satellites recorded the largest ocean swells ever seen from space, highlighting how massive waves can act as storm "messengers," carrying a storm's power across entire oceans.

Observations from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission allowed scientists to track waves born from powerful storms. These waves, driven by wind, generate swells that carry destructive energy to faraway shores — even if the storm itself never makes landfall.

Using SWOT's wide-swath imaging with radar altimetry data from Earth-observing satellites including SARAL, Jason-3, Copernicus Sentinel-3A and -3B, Copernicus Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, CryoSat and CFOSAT, researchers were able to create a global picture of how storm waves move, merge and evolve as they spread outward across the planet, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).

One storm in particular — Storm Eddie, which formed over the North Pacific in December 2024 — served as a natural laboratory for the study. During the peak of the storm, satellites observed open-ocean waves reaching nearly 65 feet (20 meters), or roughly the height of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Those are the highest ever measured from space.

Over the following two weeks, those swells traveled more than 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers), crossing the Drake Passage and entering the tropical Atlantic. Although the storm never made landfall, its waves reached distant coasts with surprising force, powerful enough in some cases to cause erosion and flooding.

Therefore, the ocean surface acts as a "messenger," the researchers said. By measuring the time between crests of large swells, also known as wave period, researchers are able to estimate a storm's size and strength. For example, a 20-second period means a large wave arrives every 20 seconds.

The study also revealed that shorter, high-energy storm waves — not just long, slow swells — carry much of the ocean's transported energy, challenging long-held assumptions about how wave power is distributed. That insight will help scientists refine global wave models and better protect coastal communities from related hazards.

Their findings were published Sept. 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

For farmers, every planting decision carries risks, and many of those risks are increasing with climate change. One of the most consequential is weather, which can damage crop yields and livelihoods. A delayed monsoon, for example, can force a rice farmer in South Asia to replant or switch crops altogether, losing both time and income.

Access to reliable, timely weather forecasts can help farmers prepare for the weeks ahead, find the best time to plant or determine how much fertilizer will be needed, resulting in better crop yields and lower costs.

Yet, in many low- and middle-income countries, accurate weather forecasts remain out of reach, limited by the high technology costs and infrastructure demands of traditional forecasting models.

A new wave of AI-powered weather forecasting models has the potential to change that.

By using artificial intelligence, these models can deliver accurate, localized predictions at a fraction of the computational cost of conventional physics-based models. This makes it possible for national meteorological agencies in developing countries to provide farmers with the timely, localized information about changing rainfall patterns that the farmers need.

The challenge is getting this technology where it's needed.

Why AI forecasting matters now

The physics-based weather prediction models used by major meteorological centers around the world are powerful but costly. They simulate atmospheric physics to forecast weather conditions ahead, but they require expensive computing infrastructure. The cost puts them out of reach for most developing countries.

Moreover, these models have mainly been developed by and optimized for northern countries. They tend to focus on temperate, high-income regions and pay less attention to the tropics, where many low- and middle-income countries are located.

A major shift in weather models began in 2022 as industry and university researchers developed deep learning models that could generate accurate short- and medium-range forecasts for locations around the globe up to two weeks ahead.

These models worked at speeds several orders of magnitude faster than physics-based models, and they could run on laptops instead of supercomputers. Newer models, such as Pangu-Weather and GraphCast, have matched or even outperformed leading physics-based systems for some predictions, such as temperature.

AI-driven models require dramatically less computing power than the traditional systems.

While physics-based systems may need thousands of CPU hours to run a single forecast cycle, modern AI models can do so using a single GPU in minutes once the model has been trained. This is because the intensive part of the AI model training, which learns relationships in the climate from data, can use those learned relationships to produce a forecast without further extensive computation – that's a major shortcut. In contrast, the physics-based models need to calculate the physics for each variable in each place and time for every forecast produced.

While training these models from physics-based model data does require significant upfront investment, once the AI is trained, the model can generate large ensemble forecasts — sets of multiple forecast runs — at a fraction of the computational cost of physics-based models.

Even the expensive step of training an AI weather model shows considerable computational savings. One study found the early model FourCastNet could be trained in about an hour on a supercomputer. That made its time to presenting a forecast thousands of times faster than state-of-the-art, physics-based models.

The result of all these advances: high-resolution forecasts globally within seconds on a single laptop or desktop computer.

Research is also rapidly advancing to expand the use of AI for forecasts weeks to months ahead, which helps farmers in making planting choices. AI models are already being tested for improving extreme weather prediction, such as for extratropical cyclones and abnormal rainfall.

Tailoring forecasts for real-world decisions

While AI weather models offer impressive technical capabilities, they are not plug-and-play solutions. Their impact depends on how well they are calibrated to local weather, benchmarked against real-world agricultural conditions, and aligned with the actual decisions farmers need to make, such as what and when to plant, or when drought is likely.

To unlock its full potential, AI forecasting must be connected to the people whose decisions it’s meant to guide.

That's why groups such as AIM for Scale, a collaboration we work with as researchers in public policy and sustainability, are helping governments to develop AI tools that meet real-world needs, including training users and tailoring forecasts to farmers' needs. International development institutions and the World Meteorological Organization are also working to expand access to AI forecasting models in low- and middle-income countries.

AI forecasts can be tailored to context-specific agricultural needs, such as identifying optimal planting windows, predicting dry spells or planning pest management. Disseminating those forecasts through text messages, radio, extension agents or mobile apps can then help reach farmers who can benefit. This is especially true when the messages themselves are constantly tested and improved to ensure they meet the farmers’ needs.

A recent study in India found that when farmers there received more accurate monsoon forecasts, they made more informed decisions about what and how much to plant – or whether to plant at all – resulting in better investment outcomes and reduced risk.

A new era in climate adaptation

AI weather forecasting has reached a pivotal moment. Tools that were experimental just five years ago are now being integrated into government weather forecasting systems. But technology alone won't change lives.

With support, low- and middle-income countries can build the capacity to generate, evaluate and act on their own forecasts, providing valuable information to farmers that has long been missing in weather services.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A massive earthquake off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula in late July triggered a tsunami that rippled across the Pacific — and NASA's experimental detection system tracked the event in real-time by monitoring the atmosphere above.

The GUARDIAN (GNSS Upper Atmospheric Real-time Disaster Information and Alert Network) taps into signals from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), like GPS. When a tsunami forms, the surge of water pushes on the air above it, sending invisible pressure waves up through the atmosphere. These waves continue rising until they reach the ionosphere — a region high above Earth where satellites send navigation signals down to the ground.

As the pressure waves ripple through the ionosphere, they bend and distort the signals, causing subtle changes that are detectable by GUARDIAN, allowing scientists to detect signs of a tsunami moving across the ocean, before the waves make landfall, according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

"Those extra minutes of knowing something is coming could make a real difference when it comes to warning communities in the path," JPL scientist Siddharth Krishnamoorthy said in the statement.

During the July 29 tsunami, GUARDIAN detected atmospheric disturbances within about 20 minutes of the magnitude 8.8 earthquake. As the tsunami waves traveled across the Pacific, the technology confirmed clear signs of their approach roughly 30 to 40 minutes before the waves reached Hawaii and other coastal sites.

While the waves themselves caused little damage, the event demonstrated that GUARDIAN could track a tsunami in real time and provide valuable lead time for coastal communities — just one day after a critical software upgrade was deployed to the ground-based network.

"NASA's GUARDIAN can help fill the gaps," Christopher Moore, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Center for Tsunami Research, said in the statement. "It provides one more piece of information, one more valuable data point, that can help us determine, yes, we need to make the call to evacuate."

GUARDIAN's readings require expert interpretation, but it is already one of the fastest tsunami-monitoring tools. Within about 10 minutes of receiving satellite data, it can detect ripples in the upper atmosphere formed by a budding tsunami. By adding a space-based layer of observation to traditional forecasting tools like buoys and seismometers, GUARDIAN could improve early warning for tsunamis worldwide.

Update 9/23: The satellites involved in the GUARDIAN system are global satellites; none belong to NASA. This article has been updated to reflect that.

SpaceX called off the planned 10th test flight of its Starship megarocket for the second day in a row on Monday (Aug. 25), this time because Mother Nature wouldn't cooperate.

SpaceX originally aimed to launch Starship Flight 10 from its Starbase site in South Texas on Sunday evening, during an hourlong window that opened at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT), but was thwarted by an issue with ground systems. The company tried again today during the same window but had to scrub again, because anvil-shaped clouds failed to clear the area. Such clouds pose an unacceptable risk of lightning, which could kill a launch in the cradle.

"Launch called off for tonight due to anvil clouds over launch site (lightning risk)," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on social media after the launch scrub. Musk was onhand for the launch attempt and gave an overview of Starship during live commentary.

"Standing down from today’s flight test attempt due to weather. Starship team is determining the next best available opportunity to fly," SpaceX said via X on Monday evening.

The next possible chance is Tuesday evening, during the same hourlong window. Whenever Starship flies again, you'll be able to watch the action here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX.

"We do have a phenomenal logistics team, so we should hopefully be able to replenish prop everything," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said during live commentary, using an abbreviation for the propellant used to launch Starship. "We don't have to refill all the water tanks because we didn't fire off the deflector, but we'll have to reload the prop."

SpaceX is developing Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other ambitious exploration feats.

The vehicle consists of two elements — a huge booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship, or simply Ship. Both stages are made of stainless steel and are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

Starship flew for the first time in April 2023 and now has nine test missions under its belt. Three of those launches occurred this year, in January, March and May.

Ship had problems on all three occasions. On both Flight 7 and Flight 8 , the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) spacecraft exploded less than 10 minutes after launch. Ship flew for much longer on Flight 9 but ended up losing its attitude control and broke apart in Earth's atmosphere during reentry.

If all goes according to plan on Flight 10, Super Heavy will perform several in-flight experiments and then guide itself to a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about seven minutes after liftoff.

Ship, meanwhile, will aim to deploy eight dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites, relight one of its six Raptor engines in space, and come down in the Indian Ocean about 66 minutes post-launch.

A major disruption to the Arctic polar vortex has bumped the ring of wind that circles the North Pole off its perch and towards Europe, a new animation shows.

The migration could trigger colder-than-average temperatures in parts of the continent and across the eastern U.S. over the coming week, climate scientists say.

The polar vortex started wandering off course March 9, when its high winds suddenly switched from blowing west to east to blowing in the opposite direction. This switch normally happens each year, but it tends to occur in mid-April — meaning this year's reversal struck unusually early, according to a blog post published April 3 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

"For much of this winter season, the polar vortex has been strong," NOAA officials wrote in the blog post. "But like a true atmospheric diva, the polar vortex had one last trick up its sleeve, breaking down in a spectacular fashion and bringing some cold air with it."

Related: Bizarre polar vortex over Antarctica delayed ozone hole opening, scientists say

The Arctic polar vortex is a circle of strong, cold winds that picks up every winter over the North Pole. The vortex is always present, but it strengthens in the winter due to a redistribution of heat from the tropics. During the winter, the winds that make up the polar vortex blow from west to east. In spring, as Earth's tilt changes and the North Pole receives more sunlight, the direction of the winds changes to blow from east to west. The winds also become weaker as a result of less heat wafting from the tropics to the pole.

These winds are located in the stratosphere — a layer of the atmosphere that extends between around 6 and 31 miles (10 to 50 kilometers) above Earth's surface.

Occasional "sudden stratospheric warming" events can disrupt the polar vortex. These events happen when large-scale atmospheric waves, called Rossby waves, get pushed into the stratosphere from below, triggering sudden spikes in temperature. Like ocean waves, Rossby waves can "break" on top of the polar vortex, weakening it and — in extreme cases — reversing the direction of its winds.

Last year, a sudden stratospheric warming event hit the polar vortex and reversed its winds in early March, but the vortex recovered. This time, "the vortex does not seem likely to gain a foothold again," NOAA officials wrote.

The switch in wind direction doesn't mean the polar vortex will immediately drop off for the summer, however. The reversed polar vortex has simply "moved off the pole, meandering around over Northern Europe," officials wrote.

NOAA's latest forecasts suggest the polar vortex is unlikely to wander back to its normal position over the North Pole. It probably won't regain its wintertime strength either, officials said, so the likelihood is that it will dissipate and eventually "enter hibernation" over Northern Europe.

As it dissipates, the polar vortex will bring below-average temperatures to Northern Europe, parts of Asia and the eastern U.S., NOAA officials wrote. "Temperatures for the last week of March were pretty normal across the eastern U.S., but the latest forecasts do predict increased chances of below-normal temperatures for the next week," they wrote.

A newly unveiled photo captured by an astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS) provides a rare glimpse at an upward-shooting "gigantic jet" of lightning likely extending more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the U.S. coast.

The striking image was taken by an unnamed ISS crewmember on Nov. 19, 2024, but it was not initially shared by NASA or any other space organization. However, photographer Frankie Lucena, who specializes in capturing giant lightning sprites, stumbled across photos of the event on the Gateway to Astronaut photography of Earth website and shared them with Spaceweather.com, which reshared the shots Feb. 26.

"I checked the ISS database for pictures before and after the event, and found that there were 4 photos [of lightning] in all," Lucena told Spaceweather.com. The images can be viewed in a time-lapse video posted on YouTube, but only one has an associated jet.

The exact location of the jet is unclear because thunderclouds are covering Earth's surface in the images. However, based on the position of the ISS at the time, the jet likely occurred just off the coast of New Orleans, according to Spaceweather.com.

Related: ISS astronaut captures green auroras dancing over city lights (video)

Gigantic jets are massive lightning bolts that shoot upward from thunderstorms when the charged layers of the clouds get temporarily inverted. They mainly give off a blue light due to the high levels of nitrogen in the upper atmosphere and usually last less than a second.

Most observed gigantic jets reach the ionosphere — the part of the atmosphere that begins around 50 miles above Earth's surface and contains charged particles captured from the sun. This has earned the phenomenon the nickname "Earth's tallest lightning," according to Spaceweather.com. However, the exact height of the newly photographed bolt is unclear.

Gigantic jets are also extremely energetic. The most powerful recorded example of this phenomenon, which occurred during a thunderstorm over Oklahoma in May 2018, contained roughly 60 times more energy than a standard lightning bolt and reached up to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit (4,400 degrees Celsius).

These jets often terminate with tendrils of branching red lightning, which can be faintly seen in the new image. These additional discharges are very similar to "sprites," which often look like giant electric jellyfish. However, gigantic jets are a separate phenomenon from traditional sprites, which occur without jets, according to EarthSky.com.

Gigantic jets were first discovered relatively recently, in 2001 — so only a few dozen photographs of these massive bolts have ever been captured, according to Spaceweather.com. However, scientists think there could be up to 1,000 unseen jets every year.

Most of these images have been taken from space, but some others, including a breathtaking image from September 2018, have also been snapped by airplane passengers flying over thunderstorms.

NEW ORLEANS — Scientists continue to advance the process of updating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Scales, with the next steps expected to be taken as early as this year.

Just like there's a classification system for hurricanes and tornadoes, space weather storms that develop and pose threats to Earth have their own classification system. But these storms are a little more complex than terrestrial weather, and they must be categorized into three different types of events: geomagnetic storms, solar radiation storms and radio blackouts. These three primary areas of focus highlight the types of impacts a solar flare can have on our environment, with the scales also providing information on the likelihood of a certain level occurring and the intensity of each category, which is rated on a scale of 1 to 5.

The scales were designed in 1999 as space weather started becoming a more popular area of research. But with historic events, including the Halloween solar storm in October 2003 and the Gannon event in May 2024, bringing new information to light, leaders at NOAA and the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) determined that the information in the scales had become outdated and confusing for the public.

"This is space weather, and it's something that's challenging to many people. When you start talking about geomagnetic storms, X-rays, protons and energetic particles, people just don't really understand it," Bill Murtagh, program coordinator for the SWPC, told Space.com in an interview here at the American Meteorological Society's (AMS) annual meeting. "We have to find a balance to what's presented in the scales that benefits our primary customers, which are the operators of critical infrastructure — such as power grids, satellites and the airlines — but also for the general public."

In 2024, the SWPC collaborated with the National Weather Service and the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) to ask members of the public and the different types of stakeholders that rely on space weather conditions and forecast data to provide feedback on the current scales. Nearly 500 people from almost 200 different engagements domestically and internationally participated, and the findings were shared at the AMS' annual meeting in January.

"STPI will deliver a report to NOAA that will consist of different Space Weather Scales revision options for NOAA to consider," Daniel Pechkis, a research staff member at STPI, told Space.com in an email. "Over the next year, STPI will work with NOAA to evaluate the various options, helping them determine the feasibility and timeline needed for possible implementation. Throughout this process, STPI will continue to work with the space weather community and users of space weather information to inform SWPC's scales revision effort, delivering a suggested implementation plan near the end of the year."

Scientists at the SWPC said they are now in phase two of the process, which will entail taking the feedback and the report produced by STPI to make important decisions on what changes need to be implemented sooner than others. This will also include selecting the options that will best communicate the impacts of space weather and most benefit modern-day end users and the public.

"We're at solar maximum; to find time to make some of these big changes is going to require time and more resources, so we have to address what it will take," Murtagh said. "Some of these things we want to take a decade to do, big changes, but there's a lot of things we can do over the next year or two that can make a difference. We need to focus on what we can do in the near term that's really going to help the end users."

The third phase is going to be the "big one," Murtagh added. That will involve "making it happen, implementing change, defining and changing the products, and [creating] a subscription service to get to the customers by notifying everybody these changes are coming. And so that's going to be a lot of time and effort, but obviously it's critical to do," he said.

Murtagh played an important role in the creation of the original space weather scales, having taken part in the discussions at the SWPC in 1997 and 1998. He said some of the common themes of changes that need to be addressed include removing the description terms of each category on the scales, which range from "minor" at Level 1 to "extreme" at Level 5.

"For example, on the geomagnetic storm scale, the G5 "extreme" description is going to mean one thing to one person and something totally different to others," Murtagh explained. "It depends on their system, the sophistication of the technology they're using, and the latitude and location to where they're at.

"Another big piece of the feedback is differentiating between a G5 and a G5+ storm," Murtagh added. For example, the Gannon event was a G5, but it was nothing like the extraordinary 1859 Carrington Event. A lot of people said you need to add a level to the scales, while others proposed revision of the scales, he said.

"There's a different type of scale that would eliminate that concern of the saturation at the high end of the scale," Murtagh said. "That's a big one and would take some time to create, but we feel like we can make some progress here in the next couple of years."

Lightning strikes across Earth could make ultrahot "killer electrons" rain down around our planet, according to new research from scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder. Due to this result, the team suggests that space weather and Earth can unite to play "cosmic pinball."

The discovery was made almost by chance while the team was studying satellite data that showed high-energy and high-speed "hot" electrons could be dislodged from the inner radiation belt — a region of charged particles wrapped around our planet that's held in place by Earth's protective magnetic bubble, known as the magnetosphere.

This research could help scientists protect satellites and other instruments in orbit from damage, and assist in protecting astronauts from potentially lethal radiation on future space missions. It also suggests that space weather and Earth weather are more intertwined than previously suspected.

"These particles are the scary ones or what some people call 'killer electrons.' They can penetrate metal on satellites, hit circuit boards, and can be carcinogenic if they hit a person in space," team leader and University of Colorado Boulder researcher Max Feinland said in a statement.

Related: SpaceX's Polaris Dawn astronauts will make a daring trek into Earth's Van Allen radiation belt

Killer electrons charge!

Wrapped around Earth are two belts of trapped high-energy particles, held in place by the magnetosphere. These are known as the Van Allen radiation belts.

Killer electrons race through these belts at nearly the speed of light, carrying with them a great deal of energy. Not only can these particles penetrate satellite shielding, but they can also cause microscopic lightning strikes that can damage — or even destroy — vital and delicate spacecraft components.

The inner region of the belts is considered to begin at an altitude of around 600 miles (966 kilometers) over Earth, while the outer layer is thought to start at around 12,000 miles (19,312 km) over our planet's surface.

The Van Allen belts serve as a loose barrier between Earth's atmosphere and its space environment. They are also dynamic, capable of moving and changing. Scientists have known for some time that charged particles can fall from the outer radiation belt toward Earth. Low-energy, or "cold," particles have also been detected falling from the more stable inner radiation belt.

This is the first hint that high-energy charged particles can also "rain" from the inner belt, which had been considered more stable. It's also the first hint that this "electron rain" can be triggered by lightning.

"Space weather is really driven both from above and below," team member Lauren Blum of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder said in the statement. "Typically, the inner belt is thought to be kind of boring. It's stable. It's always there."

The team theorizes that when lightning flashes in the sky over Earth, radio waves are launched toward space. If these radio waves hit electrons in the radiation belts around our planet, they can shake loose electrons, causing "lightning-induced electron precipitation" or "electron rain."

While analyzing data from NASA's now-decommissioned Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPEX) satellite, Feinland saw "clumps" of high-energy electrons moving through Earth's inner radiation belt. He took these observations to Blum, who told him: "That's not where these are supposed to be."

Cosmic pinball

Investigating this further, the duo identified 45 surges of high-energy electrons in the inner radiation belts occurring in the decade between 1996 and 2006. Feinland then compared this data to records of lightning strikes over North America. What emerged was a correlation between lightning strikes and peaks in electrons, which occurred around a second after lightning struck the ground.

The team thinks that when lightning strikes, it begins a frantic game of pinball that encompasses the entire Earth. Triggered radio waves ripple upward into space, striking electrons in the inner radiation belt.

This acts like an "add ball" feature in this figurative pinball game, dropping electrons that then chaotically bounce between the northern and southern hemispheres of Earth. This phase of the process lasts just 0.2 seconds. Some of the electrons frantically shuttling between our planet's northern and southern hemispheres then drop into our atmosphere.

"You have a big blob of electrons that bounces and then returns and bounces again," Blum said. "You'll see this initial signal, and it will decay away."

Blum, Feinland, and colleagues don't currently know how often these bouts of "killer electron rains" occur. One theory is that they are most common during periods when the sun is especially active and blasts more high-energy electrons at Earth to be grabbed by the magnetosphere and replenish the Van Allen belts.

The team's research was published on October 8 in the journal Nature Communications.

A novel AI-powered weather model inspired by language-processing systems invented by Google is helping meteorologists at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station avoid disruptions to the busy launch schedule along Florida's Space Coast.

Rockets are among humankind's most impressive inventions, but these powerful machines are at the mercy of Mother Nature: Next to technical problems, weather is the most common cause of postponed launches. 

Most U.S. liftoffs occur from Florida, where thunderstorms are a common occurrence. Such weather systems produce lightning that can disrupt a rocket's navigation systems. Wind shear — an abrupt change in wind speed and direction occurring within a short distance in the atmosphere — "hits like a sledgehammer when [the rocket is] going up supersonic," as SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk put it in a post on Twitter (now known as X) after a 2016 launch delay. Thick clouds that could contain water ice are also a reason for a no-go, according to Headed for Space.

The U.S. Space Force's 45th Weather Squadron and its powerful supercomputers are in charge of forecasting weather for the Cape Canaveral area, including NASA's Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The squadron's meteorologists approve launch windows 48 to 72 hours in advance to allow for fueling and launch pad preparations. But weather in the area is notoriously volatile, and around 16% of rocket launches end up getting scrubbed. A new AI model, developed by San Francisco-based company Atmo AI, helps the squadron speed up weather predictions, improve accuracy and provide better spatial and temporal resolution. 

Related: Safety first: NASA pledges to use AI carefully and responsibly

"Our technology makes the weather forecast much more compact," Johan Mathe, Atmo's co-founder and chief technology officer, told Space.com. "Instead of a supercomputer, it runs from a single machine with one GPU [graphics processing unit]."

The self-learning algorithm, which digests vast amounts of weather data, is based on the same technology that powers language-processing models developed by Google. While traditional supercomputers require a lot of human input and take hours to run their complex weather models, Atmo AI's algorithms can recalculate their predictions "every few minutes" as new data arrives, Mathe explained. 

"A typical forecast takes anywhere between three and nine hours," said Mathe. "Our forecast can run in about 10 seconds. This is a critical thing. You get sensor information coming every minute, and the bottleneck becomes the forecast itself. I see that the wind speed is X and there is some rain there; you have to assimilate all this data, and then you can see the results. If it takes you nine hours to see the forecast, you will always be nine hours late."

He added that the company's AI algorithm provides up to 50% better predictions for key metrics including wind, temperature and humidity and sees differences within an area smaller than 1 square kilometer (0.4 square miles). 

The developers trained the model using 45 years' worth of weather data, looking for patterns in weather development that could signal its future evolution.

Mathe and Atmo's other co-founder, Alex Levy, have both been developing AI systems for years. Mathe previously built a company using AI for heart disease diagnostics, and Levy worked in the field of AI-driven drug discovery. They founded Atmo in 2020 and three years later began cooperating with the 45th Weather Squadron, providing forecasts for Cape Canaveral space launches. 

"Today, AI gets a lot of press for doing language models, but it is great for the type of physics and computational fluid dynamics that can solve weather forecasts," Mathe said. "It provides the meteorologists with a forecast that is of higher quality and runs much more often so that they can do their planning for the launch."

Four severe U.S. weather events were confirmed in June, bringing the number of billion-dollar disasters in the nation this year up to more than a dozen.

The country suffered 15 separate billion-dollar weather and climate events between January and June, with a combined economic toll of about $37 billion, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Since 1980, the U.S. has now experienced 391 such events, which together have caused more than $2.755 trillion worth of damage.

Related: The 'safe' threshold for global warming will be passed in just 6 years, scientists say

There were a variety of extreme weather events across the U.S. in June, as NOAA noted. In San Joaquin County, California, for example, the Correll Fire began on June 1 and burned more than 14,000 acres (5,666 hectares). 

To the north, in Deschutes County, Oregon, the Darlene 3 Fire sparked on June 25 and charred more than 3,800 acres (1,538 hectares). A severe thunderstorm dropped a monster of a hailstone in the Texas panhandle on June 2 that could set a new state record at more than 6.25 inches (15.9 centimeters) in diameter. 

In the Atlantic basin, the first named storm of the season, Alberto, made landfall as a tropical storm in Mexico on June 20 and brought some communities in Texas nearly three times the monthly average for rainfall within 48 hours.

This past June was Earth's warmest June on record and the planet's 13th month in a row of record-high temperatures, NOAA officials said in an X post.

Droughts — one of the direct consequences of human-driven climate change — afflicted a variety of regions around the United States last month. According to the July 2 U.S. Drought Monitor Report, there was a 6% increase since the end of May in the area of the contiguous U.S. experiencing drought conditions, bringing the total to 19%. Droughts intensified in most of the Southeast, much of the Mid-Atlantic region and portions of the Ohio Valley, Tennessee, eastern Oklahoma and the northern Plains. The Southwest, Kansas, the panhandle of Oklahoma, southern Texas and southern Florida, on the other hand, saw a reduction in drought intensity.

Heat was a big topic yet again; this past June ranked as the second-warmest June on record for the contiguous U.S. over the past 130 years. Looking at the six-month period between January and June, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was confirmed to be the second warmest on record, at 50.9 degrees Fahrenheit (10.5 degrees Celsius), according to NOAA.

Coast to coast, temperatures were above average for nearly every state, with record warmth in parts of the Northeast, Great Lakes, southern Plains and Mid-Atlantic. During this period, three states experienced their warmest-ever temperatures, including New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Severe turbulence, record rainfall, killer heatwaves and raging wildfires to name but a few: is it just me, or is "Is Earth's weather getting weirder?" The answer? Yes. Well, sort of. 

These weather events have happened in the past, but the problem is nowadays they're happening more frequently and to a far greater extent. 

What's causing this uptick in "global weirding" and is there anything we can do about it? Space.com spoke with a leading climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe to learn more about this strange surge in weird weather events and what it means for us.

Related: Scientists are mapping Earth's rivers from space before climate change devastates our planet

It's no secret that Earth's climate has changed dramatically over its 4.5 billion-year history. Nature has seen both warmer and colder conditions before. But it is the current rate of change that is putting the living world at risk.

"Each of us, wherever we live, are experiencing the impacts of climate change today," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe told Space.com in an interview. 

Some of us might not even be aware of the impacts climate change is having on our everyday lives. From how more extreme weather events are causing home insurance rates to rise, or how our food is becoming less nutritious and drinking water more scarce, whether we like it or not, we are all affected by climate change.

One significant direct effect of climate change is the upturn of extreme weather events that put lives at risk and have a huge economic impact. Extreme weather events attributable to climate change cost the world $143 billion USD per year, the majority of which (63%) is due to loss of human lives, according to a research paper published in the Journal Nature in 2023. 

But just how is Earth's weather getting weirder?

Heat waves

Let's begin with one of the more obvious effects of climate change: heat waves. As the world gets warmer, heat waves are not only becoming more frequent but also much more intense. 

The recent heat wave along the U.S. West Coast saw Las Vegas hit its all-time temperature record of 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius). Approximately 36 million people were exposed to an excessive warning during the extreme heatwave with temperatures running as much as 20 degrees above average for this time of year.

In Saudi Arabia, over 1,300 people died during the annual Hajj pilgrimage that coincided with an exceptional heatwave. Temperatures of 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius) were reported at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, according to the BBC. Greece has just experienced the earliest heatwave recorded in the country, and several tourists died, including British TV and radio presenter Michael Mosley. Meanwhile, northern India is reeling from the most severe heat waves it has ever seen with reported temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius). Summers in India are notoriously hot and humid, but this year's heat waves have been longer, more intense and far more frequent, according to the BBC. 

Heat waves occur when a high-pressure atmospheric system moves in and pushes warm air down toward the ground. The trouble we are currently facing is that the high-pressure systems are being reinforced as the planet warms, catalyzing a vicious cycle. 

"The warmer it is, the stronger the high-pressure system, and the stronger the high-pressure system, the warmer it is," Hayhoe explained. 

Heavy rainfall and flash floods

Another by-product of a warmer world is that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor. Wherever moisture-laden air passes over land or converges into a storm system, it can produce more severe precipitation, for example, heavier rain and snow storms.

Atmospheric rivers are one of the big players when it comes to heavy precipitation events. An atmospheric river is a river of moisture in the sky. When one of these approaches a mountain, the air is forced to rise. As it does, the air cools and the water condenses and falls out as rain.

"So what's happening is atmospheric rivers are getting stronger and bigger because they're picking up a lot more water vapor. After all, the warmer it is, the more water evaporates from the ocean." Hayhoe continued.

During the 2023/2024 fall and winter seasons, rainfall in the U.K. and Ireland was about 20% heavier due to human-induced climate change, according to the World Weather Attribution.

This year, downpours and floods have already wreaked havoc around the world, and it doesn't look like stopping anytime soon. In May a catastrophic flood struck Afghanistan, killing over 300 people in the provinces of Baghlan, Takhar and Badakhshan. In June, heavy rain swept across Switzerland, France and Italy causing landslides and torrential floods, at least seven people are reported to have been killed. In India, Nepal and Bangladesh large-scale flooding is not uncommon during the monsoon season but this year's abnormally early heavy rainfall has killed more than 40 people so far.

Hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones

Hurricanes and typhoons are a type of weather phenomenon known as tropical cyclones. Tropical cyclone is an overarching term used to describe a rotating, organized system of clouds and thunderstorms that originates over tropical or subtropical waters and has closed low-level circulation, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Once wind speeds reach 74 miles per hour or higher, a tropical cyclone is classified as a hurricane, typhoon or tropical cyclone depending on where the storm originates. The term hurricane is used in the North Atlantic, central North Pacific, and eastern North Pacific. The term typhoon is used for a disturbance in the Northwest Pacific, while the generic tropical cyclone term is used in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean. 

No matter their name, these storms are unique in that they're powered by warm ocean water. 

The planet's oceans are particularly vulnerable to climate change and our warming world. "90% of the extra heat being trapped inside the climate system is going into the ocean, not the atmosphere," Hayhoe explained. This means that there is a lot of energy to power stronger storms. As such, a far greater proportion of named storms are further intensifying and developing into hurricanes, typhoons and tropical cyclones. 

"The storms are not only there intensifying faster, they're moving more slowly. So they're sitting over you for longer and they're dumping much more rain," Hayhoe continued. 

Hurricane Harvey, which hit the U.S. in 2017, was the first significant hurricane to hit the U.S. where scientists could calculate how much of an effect climate change had on the event. Scientists found that climate change made the rainfall over Houston, Texas, during the hurricane event, three times more likely and 15% more intense.  

Wildfires

Another significant effect of climate change is a rise in how often severe wildfires occur. Wildfires have destroyed over 1.7 million acres of land during the first three months of 2024 in the U.S. alone, according to the Independent.

Though a majority of wildfires in heavily populated areas like the U.S. are due to accidental human ignition, they are exacerbated by climate change, specifically hotter, drier weather. 

"Imagine that you accidentally drop a match into a pile of green wet wood. What happens? Not much, imagine if there's snow around the wood, nothing happens" Hayhoe explains "Now imagine you drop that match into a pile of bone dry wood that's been baking in extreme heat for weeks, and even months," Hayhoe continues.

"That's why we see that the area burned by wildfires and the number of large wildfires is increasing."

Wildfire seasons are also coming earlier and lasting longer. For example, this year's wildfire season in Canada began in February, just like it did last year. In the past, however, it wouldn't start until March.

Last year (2023), Canada witnessed a fire season like no other, with approximately 45 million acres burned by over 6,500 fires. To put this into perspective, the total area burned in 2023 was eight times higher than the 40-year average, according to a report by the BBC.

Unfortunately, this devastating scenario will become more common due to climate change.

Unlike U.S. wildfires, most of the wildfires in the northern forests, like the ones observed in Canada, are caused by lightning strikes, not humans. Scientists predict an increase in lightning frequency by 11-31% for every degree of global warming, according to the BBC's report. This is because warmer air can hold more moisture, about 7% more moisture per 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) of warming. As moisture is a key ingredient in thunderstorm development, the more moisture in the air, the higher the chance of thunderstorms and accompanying lightning strikes.

Air turbulence

In May 2024, a Singapore Airlines flight encountered a severe bout of turbulence which left one person dead from a suspected heart attack and several others badly injured. The same month, a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Ireland endured strong turbulence over Turkey, leaving 12 people injured. In July 2024, dozens were injured after an Air Europa flight was hit by severe turbulence; the flight from Spain to Uruguay had to make an emerging landing in Brazil. 

A bit of turbulence is par for the course for air travelers. But a recent uptick in severe incidents has left people wondering whether climate change is to blame. 

It's a difficult one to pin directly onto climate change but there is evidence to support that it could be increasing the risk of turbulence, according to the BBC.

Two main types of air turbulence affect air travel, one is from thunderstorms and the other is called "clear air" turbulence.

Turbulence caused by thunderstorms is likely to increase because the frequency of thunderstorms is increasing due to climate change, as previously discussed. But this type of turbulence is less problematic for pilots, as it is linked to storms and therefore easier to predict. 

The other type, "clear air" turbulence, also called "invisible turbulence" is highly unpredictable and is one of the largest causes of weather-related aviation incidents. It is expected to worsen with climate change, and under specific climate change scenarios, it could become four times more frequent by 2050 compared to historical levels.

All hope is not lost

"Wherever we look around the world, we see that these weather events are getting supersized by climate change, and they're putting us all at risk," Hayhoe explains.

Though it may be hard to find any positives in a sea of negative climate change news, rest assured that the tides are changing. People are increasingly recognizing the impacts and severity of climate change. However, it remains uncertain if this awareness is spreading quickly enough. What is clear is that we all share responsibility for climate change and can take steps to mitigate it.

Without action, there is no hope. 

What you can do to help

If you're like me and often feel overwhelmed by the negative effects of climate change while also thinking "How can I help, I'm just one person?" Hayhoe has laid out a great list of how individuals can help catalyze change for the better and feel like they are making a difference. 

1. Start a conversation about why it matters, and what people can do. "That's why I do my newsletter every week," Hayhoe explains. Every week Hayhoe provides a clear-eyed and hopeful look at climate science and solutions. 
2.  Join a climate action group. Don't be alone, join one in your town, in your city, at your school, at your church, wherever it is. And if you don't have one, think about setting one up, Friends of the Earth have some useful tips on how to start.  
3. Consider where you keep your money. "Where we bank, the credit card we use, where we have our pension or retirement, if it's invested in fossil fuels, it's perpetuating the system," Hayhoe explains. We should be looking at banks that invest in clean energy and environmentally friendly enterprises like clean energy, that way we are actively contributing towards a better world with our own money.  
4. Spark ideas for change wherever you work or wherever you go to school. "That's using your voice specifically, saying why don't we do this together as a business or an organization?" Hayhoe says. 
5. Hold politicians accountable. Hayhoe explains that this doesn't only mean voting but also using your voice to tell them why it matters. "Studies have shown that politicians consistently underestimate how concerned their constituents are because they don't hear from them enough," says Hayhoe. 
6. Reduce your personal footprint. The environmental charity World Wildlife Fund has some useful resources on how you can reduce your carbon footprint, from changing the way you travel to what you eat.  

Two severe weather events in May brought the number of billion-dollar disasters for the United States in 2024 up to nearly a dozen. 

The month began with a tornado outbreak from May 6 to May 10 that stretched across 23 states, going from South Dakota to Florida. There were 167 tornadoes confirmed, including a deadly EF-4 per the Enhanced Fujita Scale, on the first day of the outbreak. This tornado devastated the towns of Barnsdall and Bartlesville in Oklahoma. Almost a week later, a derecho (a widespread, elongated wind storm that can form alongside fast-moving, severe thunderstorms) roared through Houston, Texas, with winds reaching speeds up to 100 miles per hour (161 kilometers per hour). 

The destruction was extensive, and at least eight people lost their lives from the storm.  The total of tornadoes across the U.S. in just March and April alone climbed to 450, which included the deadliest of the year — another EF-4 that claimed five lives in Greenfield, Iowa. 

Eleven separate billion-dollar weather and climate events from January through the end of May each resulted in economic losses of at least $1 billion for the nation; combined, the damage cost totaled more than $25 billion. Two of the events were winter storms and the other nine spawned from other severe storms. This adds to the already growing number of billion-dollar disasters that have occurred since 1980, which sums up to 387 events causing more than $2.74 trillion worth of damage. 

Related: 7 solar system worlds where the weather is crazy

May also had quite the climate roundup overall.

In addition to the severe storms that ravaged parts of the eastern U.S., drought conditions shifted — and droughts are one of the direct consequences of human-driven climate change, which scientists have confirmed is at an all-time high. The May 28 U.S. Drought Monitor Report shared there was a 4% drop since the end of April in the amount of the contiguous U.S. experiencing drought conditions, bringing the total to 13%. Parts of the country where the drought intensified included western Kansas, eastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming, parts of the Northwest and Florida. Much of the Upper Midwest, the Midwest, Northern Rockies and parts of Hawaii saw a reduction in drought intensity.

Heat was also a big topic during the month of May, as the month ranked as the 13th warmest on record over the past 130 years. The average temperature for the month across the contiguous U.S. came in at 62.3 degrees Fahrenheit (16.8 degrees Celsius) with the eastern half of the country, including Florida, having its warmest May on record in particular. Such heat fluctuations are also to blame on human-driven climate change; overall, meteorological spring tied with 2016 as the sixth-warmest on record with an average of 53.7 degrees F (12 degrees C). Scientists have further confirmed that the summer of 2023 was the hottest in 2,000 years and that each month last year from June through December set a global heat record for its respective history (for instance, July 2023 was the hottest July on record). 

Our planet's rivers are like our planet's arteries. They're woven across the globe in intricate networks, ferrying life-sustaining freshwater around the world. Rivers aren't just our own lifelines, providing us with the drinking water we need to survive, but their freshwater reserves are also the primary lifelines of 10 percent of all known animals and half of all known fish species, helping sustain healthy and diverse ecosystems. They are, in short, the most renewable, accessible and thus sustainable storehouses of freshwater we have.

Yet, humans have a surprisingly limited understanding of how much water Earth’s rivers hold and how fast that water moves — two features key to managing our planet's precious freshwater resource. 

Cedric David, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California likens the situation to spending money from a checking account without knowing the balance. 

Related: NASA's SWOT satellite maps nearly of all Earth's water (video)

"It's like we've had some idea of how much we're making and how much we're spending, but we didn't know how much was in the account," he told Space.com.

Much of current literature surrounding rivers references 50-year-old estimates made by the Russian Academy of Sciences, outlined in a 1974 report published in Russian that was later translated to English in 1978. This is likely because updated estimates have been difficult to gather, particularly when it comes to rivers that are far from human populations. Even satellites cannot observe how much water flows into some rivers from the land, known as runoff, which is water resulting from rainfall leftover on the planet's surface that exceeds the land's absorption capacity. That surplus water then flows into nearby water bodies, including rivers. 

River speeds are also hard to determine based on conventional "back of the envelope" formulas that are based on in-situ measurements from 50 years ago, David told Space.com. In late April, David and a team of NASA researchers embarked on a quest to provide the best estimates yet of just how much water flows through Earth's rivers, the rates at which it flows into oceans and how much both figures have changed over time.  

"We are able to revisit some good old numbers with some tricks that even we didn't know were possible," said David. "We did what we could to fix everything we could based on the limited observations we have."

By using previous satellite data to model runoff levels associated with rivers on a map, the researchers found that, from 1980 to 2009, the total volume of water in Earth's rivers was 539 cubic miles (2,246 cubic kilometers) on average, which is about half of Lake Michigan's water volume. The Amazon River Basin, which extends from the Andes Mountains in Peru to the Atlantic coast of Brazil, holds 38 percent of all Earth's water, according to the study, which was published last month in Nature Geoscience. That same basin also dumps the most water into the ocean — about 1,629 cubic miles (6,789 cubic kilometers) per year, or 18 percent of the total discharge to the ocean worldwide.

"I was hoping to demonstrate to myself that there is a lot more river water than we thought," said David. "Turns out, that's not what we got — that's a little sobering." 

The new dataset, which covers 30 percent of the planet, consists of in-situ measurements and computer models accounting for nearly 3 million river segments worldwide. It also brings to light rivers that have depleted due to overuse by humans. Climate change, irrigation projects and other landscape-modifying actions are likely affecting water supply in multiple rivers, including the Colorado River basin in the United States, the Amazon basin in South America, the Murray-Darling basin in Australia and the Orange River basin in southern Africa. 

"We're trying to give data for people to make smart decisions and start some conversations," said David. To aid that goal, the new dataset and the study is open access, meaning it is free for anyone to read online. "We're hoping it might make a little bit of a difference," he said.

He also noted the value of open science in aiding interesting scientific research as a whole. 

The work that resulted in the new paper began in early 2022, when the study’s lead author, Elyssa Collins, came across a publicly available code for a climate model David had shared online. After a few months of tinkering with the code, Collins, now a doctoral student at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, reached out to David with a few ideas, an enterprising effort that resulted in a six-month internship under David at the JPL's location in Pasadena, California. "This is just one of the many success stories [of open science] — if you give stuff for free, some cool stuff happens," said David. "It's so important that we learn from each other, that we share, that we include everybody that cares in the science we do."

In the coming years, the researchers plan to compare their latest estimates, which are based on computer models, to upcoming satellite data from NASA's Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission, or SWOT, to improve estimates of human footprint on our planet's water cycle.

"You can think of it as camera images but they just tell you the elevation of water," David said of SWOT's data. The satellite, which has been mapping the heights of water surfaces on Earth since December 2022, is helping scientists calculate the changes in height of the river, from which they estimate how much water is present and discharged. Last month, the satellite captured the depth of a temporary, shallow lake that sprouted for several weeks at the bottom of Death Valley National Park, which spans the California and Nevada border and is the hottest place on Earth. The 1-foot-deep (0.3-meter-deep) lake, dubbed Lake Manly, is spread across more area than expected for such a body of water due to strong winds, allowing SWOT to study the happenings in a region without permanent, dedicated instruments. 

Other early results show SWOT's water-height data can also fill gaps in the literature about evolving conditions during and after floods, which satellites that usually just image flooded areas usually cannot capture, and improve flood predictions.

In addition to SWOT, over 30 NASA satellites currently record data of Earth's land surface, ice, oceans and atmosphere. They're there as part of an effort the agency began in the 1980s, an effort dedicated to gleaning the data necessary to understand and forecast the weather, of course, but also to monitor cyclones, floods, wildfires and other devastating changes to the planet's climate that are exacerbated by human activities like burning coal. Offering us a view of Earth at scales that could never be achieved on the ground, these satellites are helping scientists keep an eye on animals vulnerable to habitat loss, search for signs of potential volcanic eruptions, decode the altered chemistry of coastal waters and track rates of declining sea ice.

"It's relatively underappreciated how much Earth science we do at NASA," David told Space.com. In fact, half of all science done at JPL is Earth science, he said.

"We don't have a Planet B — this is it for a long time."

Saturday, March 7, 1970, in Perry, Florida, more than half a century ago, a tiny timber town's day in the sun was spoiled by a dense overcast that obscured a long-awaited total eclipse of the sun that more than 25,000 people had come to see. 

The long-term weather records had suggested that there was a 70-percent chance of clear or partly cloudy skies, which was the primary reason why so many had gravitated to this community, normally populated by only about 8,000. 

On that dank and dreary Saturday. scientists from around the world stood in the clutter of their cameras and gauges, shaking their heads and waiting in vain for even a brief glimpse of the eclipsed sun. As the moon's giant shadow swept in on schedule, an eerie afternoon darkness fell over the landscape, accompanied by croaking frogs and chirping insects.

Related: Total solar eclipse 2024: Everything you need to know

Max Waldmeier (1912 – 2000) a Swiss astronomer and director of the Zurich Observatory, who had a special interest in the sun, had planned this trip to Perry for two years with his scientific team, mainly because of its statistically encouraging meteorological patterns. But after the moon's shadow had passed, Professor Waldmeier was near tears as he helped his colleagues dismantle their heavy equipment. 

This melancholy tale contrasts sharply with that of three amateur astronomers, who also came to Perry for the eclipse. But instead of staying under the gloomy skies, they quickly piled their equipment into a rental car and drove through the night more than 350 miles (560 kilometers) to Poston, South Carolina, where they found nearly cloud-free skies. 

At noon on eclipse day, they set up their various instruments in a tobacco field, where they watched the southwest sky change from gray to pink and then to violet-gray as the moon's shadow rushed in. They saw Baily's beads and the scarlet solar chromosphere and the whitish solar corona, brighter than a full moon, as well as irregularities in the moon's dark edge against the brilliant corona. As totality ended, a yellow "diamond ring" signaled that the spectacular event was over. Said one of the three observers: "It was the shortest three minutes of my life!" 

So, if you really want to see the upcoming total eclipse, the moral is simple:
"Stay mobile!" 

More on this in a moment. 

If you cannot catch the solar eclipse in person you can watch the total solar eclipse live here on Space.com. And keep up with all the actions with our total solar eclipse 2024 live updates blog. 

Related: How to observe the sun safely (and what to look for)

Statistics: Danger!

One should always remember that long-term climatological statistics — no matter how reliable — are not absolute.

In his 1973 novel, "Time Enough for Love," science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein came up with the following aphorism: "Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get!" 

How true this is! 

And what happened at Perry, Florida in 1970 is far from being an isolated incident. Indeed, it has certainly happened more than a few times with other eclipses over the years. 

Another excellent example of this is the total solar eclipse of July 11, 1991. The Big Island of Hawaii was entirely within the totality path. Climatology dictated that when the northeast trade winds blow, the eastern (windward) side of the island would see heavy clouds and rain, while on the sheltered lee (western side) of the island, the trades would blow downslope and dry out. Since the trade winds blow 95 percent of the time in July, the assumption was that clear skies were a given for the western side of Hawaii. Unfortunately, a tropical upper tropospheric trough ("TUTT") moved over the Big Island on eclipse day, bringing more clouds than sun and disappointing the tens of thousands of people who had come to Hawaii to view the eclipse.

In recent weeks, I have spoken to many people who have made arrangements to witness the April 8 eclipse from Texas. Remarks typically are along the lines of: "I've chosen Texas because that's where the odds by far, favor clear skies." In actuality, however, the weather outlook from Texas through the Deep South looks only marginal at best. 

Climatological records indicate little difference, from the point of view of weather from Texas to Arkansas. Throughout this area, average cloud cover in April is consistently about 60-65 percent. Clear days occur on April 8 in about 45-50 percent of the years for which records are available, and the chances of seeing the eclipsed sun at any given moment on April 8 is about 55-60 percent. Admittedly, these conditions are somewhat better than those for the Northeast United States, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada, but, surprisingly, not that much better. 

In short, April weather is extremely variable and changeable, so at any location along the totality path, there is some hope of very clear skies (or dense clouds) on eclipse day. 

Keys to success: Latest forecasts, good judgment and mobility

Truly reliable meteorological weather forecasts for eclipse day are not possible more than a week or so ahead of time. For mid-latitudes during late winter and early spring, large daily deviations from normal frequently occur. We must also take into account the eclipse itself, for even if April 8 starts with exactly normal cloud cover, it would not be normal at the time of totality because of the roughly 75-minute interval of increasing partial eclipse.  During that interval, the reduced solar heating will result in a cooling of the local atmosphere, attended by decreased cumuliform clouds as well as an increase of stratiform cloudiness, as has actually been observed at past eclipses. 

So, if, on eclipse day, your observing site has blue skies mixed with a scattered-to-broken layer of puffy cumulus clouds just prior to the start of the eclipse, you might want to stay right where you are, because as the partial phases progress and the sun wanes to a thin crescent, the ambient air temperature will likely fall and those convective clouds — driven by warming sunlight — will dissipate. Conversely, if the local atmosphere is somewhat humid or muggy, low-stratus clouds or even fog could develop as the air cools. 

In view of such weather uncertainties, plans about where to observe should be kept flexible up to the latest possible time before the eclipse, which (as was the case in 2017) occurs on a Monday. 

Related: Solar eclipse 2024 weather prospects: Q&A with an expert

Right now, NOAA's Weather Prediction Center is providing increasingly reliable forecast products, which will enable people to choose a location where the chances of a cloudy sky are low. These can be augmented by forecasts issued by National Weather Service forecast offices located near and along the totality path. 

By this upcoming weekend, it will be time to shift from FORE-casting to NOW-casting: The very latest meteorological data, including careful scrutiny of satellite images and radar scans, should be used to modify the plans based on climatological data only. 

Eclipse chasers today have a tremendous advantage over those from just 20 years ago, in that they can now utilize their smartphone screens to view satellite and radar imagery, as well as GPS data to help make last-minute moves on local roadways. An excellent hard-copy reference guide to augment your digital data is the "Road Atlas for the Total Solar Eclipse of 2024" by retired NASA astrophysicist and avid eclipse chaser, Fred Espenak. The Atlas contains a comprehensive series of 26 maps of the path of totality across Mexico, the USA and Canada. 

Finally . . . as we stressed earlier . . . a mobile strategy will offer you the highest probability of witnessing this greatest of celestial road shows, for regardless of where you plan to be, staying mobile to dodge cloud cover will always enhance your chances. 

To those who plan to position themselves in the totality path with hopes of experiencing the panoply of phenomena that accompany that magical exclamation "totality!" we wish one and all good luck and clear skies. 

Google DeepMind has developed a machine learning algorithm that it claims can predict the weather more accurately than current forecasting methods that use supercomputers.

Google's model, dubbed GraphCast, generated a more accurate 10-day forecast than the High Resolution Forecast (HRES) system run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) — making predictions in minutes rather than hours. Google DeepMind brands HRES the current gold standard weather simulation system.

GraphCast, which can run on a desktop computer, outperformed the ECMWF on more than 99% of weather variables in 90% of the 1,300 test regions, according to findings published Nov. 14 in the journal Science. 

But researchers say it is not flawless because results are generated in a black box — meaning the AI cannot explain how it found a pattern or show its workings — and that it should be used to complement rather than replace established tools.

Related: Is climate change making the weather worse?

Forecasting today relies on plugging data into complex physical models and using supercomputers to run simulations. The accuracy of these predictions relies on granular details within the models, and they are energy-intensive and expensive to run.

But machine learning weather models can operate more cheaply because they need less computing power and work faster. For the new AI model, researchers trained GraphCast on 38 years' worth of global Earth weather readings up to 2017. The algorithm established patterns between variables such as air pressure, temperature, wind and humidity that not even the researchers understood. 

After this training, the model extrapolated forecasts from global weather estimates made in 2018 to make 10-day forecasts in less than a minute. Running GraphCast alongside the ECMWF's high-resolution forecast, which uses more conventional physical models to make predictions, the scientists found that GraphCast gave more accurate predictions on more than 90% of the 12,000 data points used. 

GraphCast can also predict extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, cold spells and tropical storms, and when Earth's upper atmospheric layers were removed to leave only the lowest level of the atmosphere, the troposphere, where weather events that impact humans are prominent, the accuracy shot up to more than 99%.

"In September, a live version of our publicly available GraphCast model, deployed on the ECMWF website, accurately predicted about nine days in advance that Hurricane Lee would make landfall in Nova Scotia," Rémi Lam, a research engineer at DeepMind, wrote in a statement. "By contrast, traditional forecasts had greater variability in where and when landfall would occur, and only locked in on Nova Scotia about six days in advance."

Despite the model's impressive performance, scientists don't see it supplanting currently used tools anytime soon. Regular forecasts are still needed to verify and set the starting data for any prediction, and as machine learning algorithms produce results they cannot explain, they can be prone to errors or "hallucinations."

Instead, AI models could complement other forecast methods and generate faster predictions, the researchers said. They can also help scientists see shifts in climate patterns over time and get a clearer view of the bigger picture.

"Pioneering the use of AI in weather forecasting will benefit billions of people in their everyday lives. But our wider research is not just about anticipating weather — it's about understanding the broader patterns of our climate," Lam wrote. "By developing new tools and accelerating research, we hope AI can empower the global community to tackle our greatest environmental challenges."

New research indicates that severe space weather events, such as solar flares, disrupt birds' navigational skills during long migrations.

Previous research has indicated that when flying at night, birds (and many other animals) use Earth's magnetic field for navigation. Because solar events disrupt the magnetic field — as well as produce auroras — birds have more difficulty navigating during them.

The new study analyzed images taken from 37 NEXRAD Doppler weather radar stations, which can detect groups of migrating birds, as well as data from ground-based magnetometers, to study 23 years of bird migration across the U.S. Great Plains. The 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) span from North Dakota to Texas is considered a major migratory corridor for birds.

Related: How ordinary spacecraft sensors could improve our understanding of space weather

"The biggest challenge was trying to distill such a large dataset — years and years of ground magnetic field observations — into a geomagnetic disturbance index for each radar site," Daniel Welling, University of Michigan space scientist said in a statement. "There was a lot of heavy lifting in terms of assessing data quality and validating our final data product to ensure that it was appropriate for this study."

The work paid off. The researchers discovered that the number of migrating birds in this region decreases by 9 to 17 percent during severe space weather events. They also noticed increased rates of birds becoming lost during migration, a phenomenon known as migratory bird vagrancy.

"Our findings highlight how animal decisions are dependent on environmental conditions — including those that we as humans cannot perceive, such as geomagnetic disturbances — and that these behaviors influence population-level patterns of animal movement," Eric Gulson-Castillo, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, who served as lead author on a study about the research, said in the same statement.

Interestingly, severe space weather events can also throw off human navigation. Solar outbursts affect satellite communications, disrupting technology like GPS. We can expect more extreme space weather events as the sun builds towards a peak in its 11-year solar activity cycle, expected to occur in 2025. But like weather on Earth, space weather is a fickle fellow and predictions can turn on a dime. 

The team's findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Oct. 9.

Follow Stefanie Waldek on Twitter @StefanieWaldek.

Tropical Storm Lee could potentially strengthen into an "extremely dangerous major hurricane" in the Atlantic Ocean by this weekend, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) reports.

Forecasters are monitoring the tropical storm's path and "are confident" that it will next careen toward the Leeward Islands, a cluster of islands that includes the U.S. Virgin Islands and is located where the Atlantic meets the Caribbean Sea, according to The Washington Post.

The NHC projects that Lee could reach "hurricane strength very soon, and to a major hurricane within 48 hours," the NHC wrote in its Wednesday (Sept. 6) forecast. "Continued strengthen[ing] seems likely after that time, but hard-to-predict eyewall replacement cycles could cause some fluctuations in intensity later in the weekend and early next week."

Related: Hurricane Idalia slams into Florida as astronauts and satellites track it from space (video, photos)

Currently, Lee is situated roughly 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) east of the northern Leeward Islands, with winds at approximately 70 mph (113 km/h), and is sweeping west-northwest at 14 mph (22 km/h), according to the forecast.

Lee became a tropical storm on Tuesday (Sept. 5) after forming over the central tropical Atlantic, according to the NHC. If it reaches at least 74 mph (119 km/h), it will be considered a Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

As Lee continues its momentum to the west-northwest, favorable conditions will likely help it become a full-fledged hurricane, including "plenty of moisture, low wind shear and abnormally warm water [that] stretch nearly the entire length of [its] projected path," CNN reported.

Lee is not expected to impact the United States at this time, according to CBS News.

It would be the fourth tropical storm to become a hurricane this season, following in the paths of Don, Franklin and Idalia, according to CNN.

This year's El Niño may drive ocean temperatures to "substantially exceed" those recorded during the last strong event in early 2016, scientists have warned.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) latest El Niño update also says there is a more than 95% chance the event will last through to February 2024, with far-reaching climate impacts.

"El Niño is anticipated to continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter," NOAA staff wrote in the update. "Our global climate models are predicting that the warmer-than-average Pacific ocean conditions will not only last through the winter, but continue to increase."

Scientists officially announced the onset of El Niño in early June. El Niño is an ocean-warming event that typically occurs every two to seven years in the central and eastern Pacific, driving air temperatures up around the globe.

Its strongest climate impacts are usually felt during the Northern Hemisphere's winter and early spring, bringing more rain and storms across the southern U.S., southeastern South America, the Horn of Africa and eastern Asia. In other parts of the world, such as southeastern Africa and Indonesia, El Niño leads to drier conditions and may increase the risk of drought.

Related: NASA doesn't know what poked these holes in the Arctic sea ice...

To track El Niño's progress, scientists measured sea surface temperatures in the east-central tropical Pacific Ocean. Abnormally high temperatures seem to confirm early predictions that this year's event could be a big one. Atmospheric conditions are also consistent with a long-lasting El Niño, according to NOAA.

"El Niño is a coupled phenomenon, meaning the changes we see in the ocean surface temperatures must be matched by changes in the atmospheric patterns above the tropical Pacific," the update said. More rain and clouds over the central Pacific, as well as weak pressure in the east and reduced trade wind activity in the west, suggest "the system is engaged and that these conditions will last through the winter," staff added.

Sea surface temperatures in the east-central tropical Pacific exceeded the long-term average for 1991 to 2020 by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) throughout the month of July. Temperatures from May to July — a three-month average called the Oceanic Niño Index — were also 1.4 F (0.8 C) higher than usual and marked the second warmer-than-average Oceanic Niño Index in a row.

"We need to see five consecutive three-month averages above this threshold before these periods will be considered a historical 'El Niño episode,'" the update said. "Two is a good start."

There is "a good chance" the Oceanic Niño Index will match or exceed the threshold for a "strong" El Niño, the update added.

And forecasters are now confident the event will remain strong through to next year, although this doesn't necessarily equate to strong impacts locally, they noted

El Niño affects global weather patterns, as well as the Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons. The event usually dampens hurricanes over the Atlantic Ocean, but this year's sizzling water temperatures could mitigate this dampening effect , according to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.

While a hurricane update in May predicted a 30% chance of higher activity over the Atlantic, the latest forecast said there is a 60% chance of an "above normal season," with up to 21 named storms and five major hurricanes.

An innocent-looking tropical depression has exploded into the powerful Hurricane Hilary in just two days off the Pacific Coast of Central America and is now headed to Southern California as the first tropical storm to hit the region in more than 80 years.

The GOES-18 weather satellite operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration watched Hillary evolve at rocket speed from a mild tropical depression into a forceful Category 4 hurricane. Packing sustained winds of 145 mph (233 kph), Hillary is moving northward to Baja California where it is expected to make landfall on Sunday (Aug. 20), according to AccuWeather. 

Fortunately, by that time, the hurricane will weaken either to Category 1 or to an even weaker tropical storm. 

Related: New and improved satellites will help track storms this hurricane season

Nevertheless, the bad weather that Hilary is pushing ahead of itself forced SpaceX to cancel a planned Starlink launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Friday morning.

"Due to Hurricane Hilary impacting recovery operations in the Pacific, we are standing down from tonight's Falcon 9 launch of @Starlink," SpaceX said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Next launch opportunity is no earlier than Monday, August 21." 

Hilary's arrival will mark the first hurricane or tropical storm landfall in Southern California since 1939, according to AP. Weather forecasters expect the storm's impacts to be significant, with heavy rainfall across the southwestern United States and a subsequent risk of flash floods from San Diego to Las Vegas. 

Up to 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain might fall in southern California and southern Nevada, AP reported. 

Although currently away from the coast, Hilary is already bringing strong winds, storm surge and heavy rain to the coastal regions of Mexico.

El Niño is a naturally occurring phenomenon of periodic warming of sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern regions of the Pacific Ocean. La Niña is the opposite, describing cooler-than-average sea temperatures. Both El Niño and La Niña significantly affect Earth's weather patterns.

El Niño and La Niña events occur every two to seven years on average and usually last between nine to 12 months, but can sometimes persist for years. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), El Niño generally occurs more frequently than La Niña.

An El Niño is declared when sea temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific rise 0.5 degrees Celsius (32.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above the long-term average, says the national meteorological service for the U.K., the Met Office. 

Related: Climate change: Causes and effects 

What happens during El Niño and La Niña?

Under normal circumstances, permanent east-to-west winds known as trade winds blow westward along the equator in the Pacific Ocean, moving warm water from South America toward Asia, according to NOAA. The warm water is replaced by nutrient-rich cold water rising from the deep ocean in a process known as upwelling. The burst of nutrients from the depth drives seaweed growth and supports vast blooms of phytoplankton — microscopic organisms — which are a crucial energy source for large animal populations. As such, coastal upwelling regions are some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, supporting important fisheries. 

However, two opposing climate patterns, El Niño and La Niña disrupt these normal conditions. Scientists refer to these phenomena collectively as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle. 

During El Niño, the strength of trade winds diminishes, causing warm water to be redirected eastward, towards the western coastlines of the Americas and the upwelling of cold water diminishes.

But during La Niña, trade winds intensify, resulting in a greater push of warm water towards Asia. Simultaneously, off the coast of the Americas, upwelling increases, causing more cold nutrient-rich water to rise to the surface. 

The exact cause of El Niño and La Niña remains unknown.

What are the effects of El Niño?

El Niño has a substantial impact on our weather patterns as elevated ocean temperatures cause the Pacific jet stream to shift southward from its normal position. 

As a result, regions in the northern United States and Canada experience drier and warmer conditions than usual. Conversely, the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast encounter above-average rainfall during these periods, leading to increased instances of flooding, according to NOAA.

The effects of El Niño are also felt in marine populations. During El Niño, upwelling of cold nutrient-rich water weakens or ceases entirely, resulting in reduced phytoplankton. This leads to a scarcity of food for the fish populations that rely on phytoplankton as a primary food source. Consequently, the impact trickles up the food chain to other organisms dependent on fish such as seabirds and marine mammals.

In India, the occurrence of El Niño is commonly linked to the influence it exerts on the monsoon season, resulting in below-average rainfall and contributing to severe droughts, as witnessed in seven instances between 2001 and 2020. Four of those years were marked by drought conditions and a decline in summer crop production, according to the Indian news site The Economic Times.

During winters influenced by El Niño, northern Europe experiences colder and drier conditions, while southern Europe receives increased rainfall due to the shifting of the jet stream. Conversely, in the U.K., El Niño summers tend to be hotter and drier, according to the Met Office.

What are the effects of La Niña?

During La Niña the presence of cold waters in the Pacific Ocean results in a northward shift of the jet stream. This shift often leads to dry conditions in the southern United States while causing increased rainfall and flooding in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. 

During La Niña years, winter temperatures tend to be warmer than usual in the southern regions and cooler in the northern areas. Additionally, La Niña can contribute to the heightened intensity of the hurricane season.

With the increased upwelling during La Niña, marine ecosystems benefit from a flurry of nutrients from the depth. The colder waters off the Pacific coast also attract more cold-water species such as squid and salmon to the Californian coast. 

In India, the presence of La Niña can result in heightened rainfall and a significantly stronger monsoon season. According to the Met Office, summers in the UK typically exhibit a greater tendency towards wetter conditions. 

El Niño FAQs answered by an expert

We asked Aaron Levine, a postdoctoral research associate at NOAA's Pacific Marine and Environmental Laboratory in Seattle a few commonly asked questions about El Niño. 

Additional resources

Learn more about El Niño and La Niña with these helpful resources from NOAA Climate. Discover how El Niño affects wildlife with this article from BBC Wildlife Magazine. For further information on El Niño check out these resources from National Geographic.

Bibliography

Birewar, D. (2023). How El Nino may impact agriculture and monsoon this year? The Economic Times. [online] 6 Jun. Available at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/how-to/how-el-nino-may-impact-agriculture-and-monsoon-this-year/articleshow/100787045.cms [Accessed 29 Jun. 2023].

Gaines, S. and Airame, S. (n.d.). NOAA Ocean Explorer: Sanctuary Quest: Background. [online] oceanexplorer.noaa.gov. Available at: https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/02quest/background/upwelling/upwelling.html

Lakes of India. (2023). La Nina and El Nino Effect in India. [online] Available at: https://lakesofindia.com/2023/01/16/la-nina-and-el-nino-effect-in-india / [Accessed 29 Jun. 2023].

Met Office (n.d.). What are El Niño and La Niña? [online] Met Office. Available at: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/oceans/el-nino

Met Office. (n.d.). El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) region sea surface temperature forecasts. [online] Available at: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/gpc-outlooks/el-nino-la-nina[Accessed 29 Jun. 2023].

www.weather.gov. (2023). NOAA declares the arrival of El Nino. [online] Available at: https://www.weather.gov/news/230706-ElNino.

For the first time in 7 years, El Niño conditions have developed in the Tropical Pacific, prompting expert to urge that preparation for extreme weather events will be necessary to protect lives and safeguard livelihoods.

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon that is connected to ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned that El Niño conditions signal the possibility of a surge in global temperatures and disruptive weather. The WMO added that there is a 90% probability El Niño conditions will continue into the latter half of 2023 and until the end of the year.

"The onset of El Niño will greatly increase the likelihood of breaking temperature records and triggering more extreme heat in many parts of the world and in the ocean," WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

Related: Climate change hits Antarctica hard, sparking concerns about irreversible tipping point

"The declaration of an El Niño by WMO is the signal to governments around the world to mobilize preparations to limit the impacts on our health, our ecosystems, and our economies," Taalas added. "Early warnings and anticipatory action of extreme weather events associated with this major climate phenomenon are vital to saving lives and livelihoods."

The last major El Niño event occurred in 2016, a year that remains the joint hottest 12 months on record, tied with 2020. 2016's status as a record hot year due to a "double whammy" of a powerful El Niño event and the effect of greenhouse gases on climate change. 

According to the WMO, the 8-year period containing 2016 and 2023 has been the hottest since record-keeping began in 1880. 

El Niño is a "wake-up" call about climate change targets

According to the Met Office in the U.K., El Niño conditions are declared when sea temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific rise half a degree above the long-term average. This occurs on average every 2 to 7 years in bouts that last between 9 and 12 months.

Despite the fact that El Niño is a natural phenomenon, it can't be viewed in isolation from human-driven (anthropogenic) climate change. 

In a report published in May this year, the WMO was already predicting a 98% chance that one of the next five years, and this five-year period as a whole, would be a record-breaker in terms of global temperature, displacing 2016 and 2020 from the top spot as the warmest years on record.

The report also suggested there is a 66% possibility that the annual average near-surface global temperature will, at some point between 2023 and 2027, reach 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels for at least a year.

"This is not to say that in the next five years, we would exceed the 1.5°C level specified in the Paris Agreement because that agreement refers to long-term warming over many years," WMO Director of Climate Services Chris Hewitt said. "However, it is yet another wake-up call, or an early warning, that we are not yet going in the right direction to limit the warming to within the targets set in Paris in 2015 designed to substantially reduce the impacts of climate change."

El Niño and La Niña in 2023

El Niño events are usually linked to an increase in rainfall and even flooding in parts of the southern U.S., southern South America, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia. 

On the flip side of this, the phenomenon is believed to lead to severe droughts across Central America, northern South America, Australia, Indonesia, and parts of southern Asia.

The effects of El Niño are generally considered to be the opposite of those of another climate-driving event, La Niña, periods of cooler than average sea surface temperature in the equatorial Pacific. The last La Niña ended in March 2023.

A month prior to the end of La Niña, average sea surface temperature anomalies in the central-eastern equatorial Pacific rose from nearly half a degree below average in February to around almost a full degree above average in mid-June. This, coupled with atmospheric observations, strongly hinted at the onset of El Niño conditions. 

A fully established connection between ocean and atmosphere temperatures could take another month to fully couple in the tropical Pacific.

"As warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures are generally predicted over oceanic regions, they contribute to the widespread prediction of above-normal temperatures over land areas," the WMO recently said in its regular Global Seasonal Climate Update (GSCU) for July, August and September. "Without exception, positive temperature anomalies are expected over all land areas in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere."

Rainfall conditions for these three months are forecast to be in line with what would be expected for an El Niño period. The WMO said that the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) will now monitor El Niño conditions and their impacts on rainfall and temperature on national and local levels. In addition to this, the WMO said it will issue updates on El Niño over the coming months as needed.

Scientists are using rockets to search for giant hurricane-like swirls in the region near where Earth's atmosphere meets space. 

These vortices could be important for understanding weather patterns in the upper atmosphere that impact the entire planet, as well as "buoyancy waves" that travel all the way up to space. 

NASA's Vorticity Experiment (VortEx) employs four sounding rockets launched in pairs to characterize dynamics in the upper mesosphere and lower thermosphere, layers of Earth's atmosphere that lie roughly 56 to 75 miles (90 to 120 kilometers) above the planet. The first two of these four rockets launched from Norway on Thursday night (March 23).

Related: Earth's atmosphere: Facts about our planet's protective blanket

In particular, the mission is hunting high-altitude winds that can buffet tall buildings, mountaintops and aircraft, and which have effects that extend well past humanity's usual reach into the upper atmosphere. These winds cause buoyancy waves, which NASA describes as giant pulses of energy that drive changes at our planet's interface with space.

Buoyancy waves "could come from approaching storm fronts, or winds hitting the mountains and being sent upwards," VortEx principal investigator Gerald Lehmacher, a professor of physics at Clemson University in South Carolina, said in a statement.

This phenomenon can drive a gust or disturbance that suddenly pushes denser air upward into a lower-pressure region of the atmosphere. This creates an oscillation as the atmosphere tries to return to equilibrium, generating buoyancy waves that spread outward from the disturbance, similar to ripples created when a stone is dropped into a pond. 

Buoyancy waves may be common, but the effect they have in the upper atmosphere — particularly what happens when they meet the edge of Earth's boundary with space — is still something of a mystery.

"In the broadest sense, this experiment is about learning about the fate of buoyancy waves at the edge of space," Lehmacher said.

The scientists behind VortEx are seeking answers regarding a specific phenomenon — hurricane-shaped swirls, or vortices, which are thought to be created when buoyancy waves rise through stable parts of the atmosphere, causing the air to move in giant swirls. 

"They could turn into whirls," Lehmacher said. "This could be happening everywhere in the atmosphere, but we simply don't have the measurements to know."

These vortices can stretch for tens of miles, making them too large to be measured effectively using conventional methods. That's why VortEx is going the unconventional route, using rockets to measure winds across widely spread locations. 

To obtain these measurements, the VortEx mission is launching four suborbital rockets from the Andøya Space Center in Norway, two at a time with a delay of a few minutes. Each pairing includes one high-flying rocket, a Black Brant 9 that can reach altitudes of around 373 miles (600 km), and one lower-altitude rocket, the Terrier-Improved Orion, which can soar to heights of around 217 miles (350 km). After a few minutes of flight, the rockets fall back to Earth, landing in the Norwegian Sea.

While the Black Brant 9 will help measure winds at an altitude of around 224 miles (360 km), the Terrier-Improved Orion will assist in the measurement of air density, which affects how vortices form, at a height of around 87 miles (140 km). The VortEx rockets conduct these measurements by releasing luminescent clouds into the atmosphere.

To ensure the clouds are spread across a wide distance so large-scale patterns can be spotted, the four rockets will eject four sub-payloads one at a time. Each sub-payload will potentially get 25 miles (40 km) from the rocket before releasing luminescent clouds.

The net result will be 16 different clouds at differing heights that spread to different distances. The VortEx team will study these clouds for swirling patterns using the Alomar Observatory in Andenes, Norway, to detect buoyancy waves happening in real time.

The potential for spotting buoyancy waves will be boosted by the presence of the Scandinavian mountains, which run the length of Norway from north to south, in the testing region. The mountains are a steady source of buoyancy waves created as winds hit their slopes and move upward, VortEx team members said. 

The measurement of vortices by the VortEx mission could be a major step forward in the understanding of upper atmospheric weather, which can affect GPS navigation and communication signals. These vortices could also shed light on buoyancy waves that can't be modeled accurately by computers, as the behavior of vortices is much easier to predict. 

"Vortical structures follow certain universal rules that we could put into models to make them work at these scales," Lehmacher concluded. "Instead of tracking individual buoyancy waves, you would just describe them with a spectrum of vortices."

The VortEx mission was originally supposed to launch from the Andøya Space Center on March 17, but uncooperative weather pushed the liftoffs back repeatedly. The first pair of rockets got off the ground on Thursday (March 23); the second pair apparently has not yet launched.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

At least one interplanetary weather report dropped on World Meteorological Day.

NASA's Perseverance rover imaged drifting predawn clouds on the Red Planet recently, taking a brief break from its ongoing search for signs of ancient Mars life. Mars is a dry and dusty planet, but billions of years ago water likely pooled and flowed in many areas on its surface, providing a potential life-friendly spot for microbes.

The new cloud images, released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory today (March 23), were taken with one of the rover's navigation cameras just before Martian sunrise on March 18. That was the 738th Martian day, or sol, of Perseverance's mission; a sol is just a little longer (24 hours, 37 minutes) than a day on Earth.

Related: How NASA will launch Mars samples off the Red Planet

The brief NASA release describing the clouds had no further information about what exactly is being studied. 

Last year, however, NASA initiated a citizen science project probing Martian clouds, which are made up of carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice. Studying the clouds provides a window into conditions in the planet's middle atmosphere, at roughly 30 to 50 miles (50 to 80 kilometers) in altitude, officials said at the time.

Perseverance recently arrived at a new area nicknamed "Berea," where it is just about to further scrutinize an intriguing layered rock, mission officials tweeted yesterday (March 22). More generally, Perseverance and a little helicopter called Ingenuity are exploring an ancient river delta in Jezero Crater that may have hosted ancient life. Ingenuity will likely reach 50 flights, 10 times its original manifest, in the coming days or weeks.

Related: Fly over Perseverance rover's Mars stomping grounds in new video

Perseverance is also gathering samples for future return to Earth, a campaign that's a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency. That campaign's formulation is still being determined, however. The baseline plan released last year called for Perseverance to carry its samples over to a rocket-toting lander, which is scheduled to launch toward Mars in 2028.  If the rover is unable to do that, two small helicopters aboard the lander will pick up the lightsaber-shaped sample tubes that Perseverance has placed on the surface as a backup plan.

But now NASA's Science Mission Directorate is considering changes to reduce the cost, such as having only a single helicopter fly aboard the lander in 2028, according to a livestreamed town hall meeting held earlier today that addressed NASA fiscal 2024 budget negotiations that are ongoing.

On our own planet, World Meteorological Day is celebrated annually on March 23 to commemorate the founding of the World Meteorological Organization on that day in 1950. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently warned once again of dire consequences if humans ignore the perils of global warming.

Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of "Why Am I Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

Planet Earth is on a trajectory to cross a dangerous climate warming threshold in the next decade unless speedy action is taken to drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions, a new United Nations report states. 

Such global warming will have environmental consequences that would affect billions of people all over the world. Here we look at some of the worst weather disasters that hit the planet over the past 12 months, providing a disconcerting glimpse of what may lie ahead. 

The report, released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. advisory body, on Monday (March 20) states that, without strengthening mitigation policies, the world may warm by more than 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) by the end of this century. Experts warn that any warming beyond the 1.5 degree C (2.7 degrees F) threshold, identified in the 2015 Paris Agreement, will have unpredictable effects. This threshold, the report states, may be breached as early as 10 years from now.

"Warming of 3 degrees [C] would have a dramatic impact on human health, the biosphere, food security and the global economy," Petteri Taalas, the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), commented on the IPCC report in a statement.  "Many of those risks could be avoided if we would stay within 1.5 degrees [C] warming."

Related: 10 devastating signs of climate change from space

He added that the WMO will soon release its own global climate change report, which will show that "all of the climate parameters are moving in totally the wrong direction." Those parameters include "ocean warming, ocean acidification, melting of glaciers, sea level rise, flooding and drought events, and concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide" in Earth's atmosphere. 

We may already have a glimpse of what these "wrongly heading parameters" mean in real life. In the past 12 months, many parts of the world experienced weather-related disasters that were in various ways extraordinary. The five events presented here, however, are just the tip of the iceberg. 

1. Europe hit by worst drought in 500 years

The summer of 2022 was like no other across swaths of western and central Europe. The proverbially rainy England didn't see a drop of rain in weeks. For a few days in July, temperatures soared to unprecedented (for England) 105 degrees F (40 degrees C), smashing records across the country. In Germany and the Netherlands, water levels in the mighty Rhine River, Western Europe's most important waterway, dropped so low that ship traffic had to be restricted for weeks. The Danube and  Po rivers, in Eastern Europe and Italy, respectively, experienced similar conditions.

Over a period of several months, satellites watched from space as the usually green and lush continent turned a parched beige. Authorities in several European countries, such as Spain, the Netherlands, France and the U.K. instated water usage restrictions, including car washing and garden irrigation bans. According to the European Union's environmental program Copernicus, the drought of 2022 may be the worst the continent has experienced in 500 years.

2. Pakistan sees worst floods in history

While water levels in European rivers were hitting record lows, the mountainous Pakistan in southwestern Asia struggled with the exact opposite problem. From June to October 2022, vast areas of the country were submerged in flood waters. The floods, the worst in Pakistan's recorded history, struck as a result of intense monsoon rains, which, together with unusually high temperatures, exacerbated the melting of glaciers that cover the country's spectacular mountain ranges. 

The floods killed over 1,700 people and displaced more than 2 million in relatively poor Pakistan and plunged the country into a humanitarian crisis. Six months after the floods officially subsided, contaminated and stagnant water still affects nearly 2 million of Pakistan's 230 million inhabitants, according to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy (CDP). 

Pakistan, which according to the CDP produces less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, is a textbook example of the disproportionate impacts of climate change on poor and developing nations. 

According to an IPCC statement released with the new report, "almost half of the world's population lives in regions highly vulnerable to climate change." Moreover, the number of casualties from climate change-related weather disasters in those regions increased by a factor of 15  over the past decade. 

3. Hurricane Ian batters Florida and Fiona makes landfall in Canada

The Atlantic hurricane season of 2022 started late. For the first time in 25 years, not a single named tropical storm emerged above the Atlantic Ocean in the month of August. However, when the hurricane season finally arrived, it did so in a memorable way. Ultimately, it became one of the costliest hurricane seasons in history, largely due to the rampage of Hurricane Ian in late September.

The deadliest hurricane to hit Florida since 1935, Ian was remarkable for a multitude of reasons. Peaking as a Category 4 hurricane on the 5-grade Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, Ian packed an enormous amount of moisture. The torrential rains the hurricane unleashed left a trail of devastating floods in the storm's wake. This intense rainfall, some scientists believe, was a direct result of climate change and the warming of Atlantic waters observed in recent years.

Another hurricane of the 2022 season, Fiona, entered the history books when it reached Canada's east coast while still at the level of a Category 2 hurricane. The most powerful and costliest post-tropical storm in Canada's history, Fiona flooded dozens of homes and knocked down thousands of trees across the Canadian provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and southern Newfoundland.

4. Freddy, the longest-lived tropical storm ever, pummels West Africa twice

Tropical storm Freddy received much less media attention than Ian and Fiona when it rampaged western Africa in February and March 2023. From a weather disaster perspective, however, Freddy was a storm of a kind never seen before. 

With peak sustained wind intensity of more than 155 mph (250 kph), Cyclone Freddy was equal to a Category 5 hurricane. The cyclone, which first emerged off the coast of Australia in early February, became the longest-lasting tropical storm in recorded history as it tracked across the Indian Ocean over a period of five weeks. 

In meteorological jargon, Freddy was also the cyclone with the highest accumulated energy ever. Over its more than month-long life, Freddy unleashed as much wind energy as all North Atlantic tropical storms release during an average hurricane season, according to the World Meteorological Organization. 

Freddy caused little harm over the first three weeks of its existence as it tracked above open waters, but when it finally reached inhabited areas, it did so in a way unseen before. Freddy first wreaked havoc on the tropical island of Madagascar on Feb. 22 as a Category 2 storm. It then continued to Mozambique on the east African coast, where it surprised meteorologists by performing a U-turn and returning to Madagascar, and then bounced back toward Mozambique for its final landfall. 

While Freddy's death toll of 220 people may not seem that severe for such a powerful storm, meteorologists warn that Freddy's force and long duration are harbingers of things to come as climate change continues to warm oceans. 

5. Antarctic sea ice hits record low

Bad news arrived in February from scientists monitoring the Antarctic ice cap. The extent of floating sea ice surrounding the frosty continent shrank to a record low as the southern summer peaked, to only 66% of the levels usually present at this time of the year. 

The previous monthly record low out of a series of measurements that dates back to 1979 was reported in 2017, officials with the European Copernicus program said in an emailed statement. 

Europe's Sentinel satellites found below-average sea ice concentrations in all regions of the Southern Ocean, the southernmost part of the global ocean that surrounds Antarctica. 

"Our latest data show that Antarctic sea ice reached its lowest extent in the 45-year satellite data record," Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in the statement. "These low sea ice conditions may have important implications for the stability of Antarctic ice shelves and ultimately for global sea level rise. Polar ice caps are a sensitive indicator of the climate crisis, and it is important to closely monitor the changes occurring there."

What's next?

The IPCC report, however, aims for an optimistic note. All is not lost, the report's authors believe, as humankind has the tools and resources to curb greenhouse gas emissions aggressively and, if not entirely reverse, then at least somewhat limit the warming trend. 

"There is sufficient global capital to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions if existing barriers are reduced," the IPCC statement says. "Increasing finance to climate investments is important to achieve global climate goals. Governments, through public funding and clear signals to investors, are key in reducing these barriers."

But what if the governments don't take the cue? Then we are certainly headed for more Fionas, Ians, Freddys and record-breaking floods and dry spells, scientists say. 

"Every increment of warming results in rapidly escalating hazards," the IPCC statement says. "More intense heat waves, heavier rainfall and other weather extremes further increase risks for human health and ecosystems."

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

More rain is on its way to an already drenched California as forecasters observe two new "atmospheric rivers" form above the Pacific Ocean on their way to ship huge amounts of tropical moisture to the usually dry and sunny state.

After a superstorm dumped over 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) of rain in some coastal regions of California on Wednesday and Thursday (Jan. 4 and 5.), triggering flash floods and causing widespread power outages, Californians have received only a brief respite. 

A new atmospheric river is expected to arrive Friday night, bringing more deluge to the coast and heavy snowfall to mountain regions. 

"The cumulative effect of heavy rain after recent heavy rains will lead to additional considerable flood impacts this weekend, including rapid water rises and mudslides over northern and central California," the National Weather Service said in a tweet on Thursday, Jan. 5. "Flash flooding and debris flows are possible over burn scar areas [left by wildfires last summer]."

Related: Satellites watch Europe get hit by most severe winter heatwave ever

And that's not all that the current stormy weather has in store for California. The NWS said another atmospheric river is expected to arrive on Monday (Jan. 9), bringing more rain and strong winds. 

This stormy January comes after above average rainfall in December, which saw over 11.6 inches (29 cm) of rain in San Francisco, according to the Washington Post, which is more than twice the average amount for that part of the year. 

Most of the moisture causing the deluges is being channeled from Hawai'i by so-called atmospheric rivers, channels that form in Earth's atmosphere and funnel water vapor from humid tropical regions to drier areas farther away from the equator. 

The type of atmospheric river ravaging California is sometimes referred to as the Pineapple Express in a nod to the fruit commonly grown in Hawai'i. 

According to NASA, atmospheric rivers off California's coast form regularly during winter months and usually deliver up to 50% of the region's annual rain and snow. 

The current series of atmospheric rivers is, however, particularly treacherous due to their combination with a pronounced area of low pressure, which led to the formation of an extremely powerful storm meteorologists call a bomb cyclone, such as the one that battered the area on Wednesday.

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

A so-called atmospheric river is bringing huge amounts of tropical moisture to California, prompting weather forecasters to issue alerts for high risks of flooding. 

Atmospheric rivers are channels that form in Earth's atmosphere and funnel water vapor from the typically humid tropical regions to drier areas farther away from the equator. These channels can transport huge amounts of water within a short period of time, causing deluges when they make landfall. 

The type of atmospheric river threatening California on Wednesday and Thursday (Jan. 4 and Jan. 5) is a phenomenon that appears regularly. It's sometimes called the Pineapple Express, a reference to the fruit commonly grown in Hawai'i where this river originates. 

The current atmospheric river has combined with a region of low air pressure that swirls above the Pacific Ocean, together forming a powerful storm that threatens the usually sunny state. 

Related: Europe warming twice as fast as rest of the world, new report reveals

Satellites of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are monitoring the weather system, revealing its various aspects including wind speeds and expected amount of rain. 

The NOAA Weather Prediction Center (WPC) has issued a moderate risk alert for excessive rain over parts of the Californian coast for Wednesday and Thursday morning.

"The associated heavy rain will create numerous areas of flash flooding," the WPC said in a statement. "Furthermore, many streams may flood, potentially affecting larger rivers."

In higher altitude regions, such as in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the rain will turn into heavy snow, WPC said. 

This is not the first atmospheric river to hit California  recently. On the last day of December, a similar channel dumped a record-breaking 5.46 inches (14 centimeters) of rain on downtown San Francisco. 

The current storm system threatens to pour over 1 inch (2.5 cm) per hour on the already soaked ground, causing concerns that mudslides may occur in hilly landscapes in the region, WPC said. 

According to the Washington Post, over 11.6 inches (29 cm) of rain fell in San Francisco in December. That's more than twice the December average for the city, which is 4.76 inches (12 cm).

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

An "atmospheric river" is dumping a "pineapple express" upon the U.S. west coast, but no fruits are involved in this process.

Heavy rain and snow are visible in Earth-gazing satellites on Thursday (Dec. 29) gazing at the U.S. west coast, including several in the fleet of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Much of California is now under flood watch after facing severe droughts and wildfires through 2022, NOAA said in a tweet. 

The state is now under an "atmospheric river", which is a thin region of the atmosphere that ship water vapor outside of the tropics, NOAA website materials add. And some of those effects include exports from Hawai'i.

Related: Satellite sees deadly blizzard and 'bomb cyclone' blanket the US (photos)

The "Pineapple Express," NOAA officials said, is a form of atmospheric river that brings moistures from tropical regions near Hawai'i to the U.S. West Coast, a distance of some 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers).

"Not all atmospheric rivers cause damage; most are weak systems that often provide beneficial rain or snow that is crucial to the water supply," NOAA officials added. "Atmospheric rivers are a key feature in the global water cycle and are closely tied to both water supply and flood risks — particularly in the western United States."

This time, however, the National Weather Service has some travel advisories for local residents who may be facing flood conditions, along with storm watches.

Both NOAA and NASA have a fleet of Earth-gazing satellites constantly keeping a watch on the planet for weather forecasts, disaster response and long-term climate monitoring.

The information gained from the fleet can be useful in producing local forecasts. For example, after atmospheric rivers are spotted, NOAA can offer flood warnings to potentially affected regions as far as a week in advance, the agency said.

Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of "Why Am I Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

A sundog is a concentrated patch of sunlight that is occasionally seen to the right or the left of the sun or even on both sides of our star in the sky simultaneously.

Also called mock suns or parhelia, meaning "with the sun," according to the National Weather Service. Sundogs are part of a family of atmospheric optical illusions including moon haloes and the closely related sun haloes. All of these phenomena are caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere. 

Sundogs typically appear as a pair of patches of light with subtle colors which manifest at the same altitude over the horizon as the sun. They can appear in a variety of forms, sometimes as colorful spots, or other times, so intense and bright they appear to be two additional suns in the sky. 

Related: Red lightning: The electrifying weather phenomenon explained

The name "sundog" is believed to date back to Greek mythology according to Almanac, though this isn't the definitive origin of the name. The name may reflect the belief that as Zeus the father of all gods and the god of the sky in Greek mythology, walked his dogs through the sky they often appeared as companions to the sun as two "false suns."

What causes sundogs?

Sundogs are formed when light passes through hexagonal plate crystals of ice, suspended in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds located at altitudes of around 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) and higher, up to 40,000 feet (12,000 meters). 

These ice crystals can also be found much closer to the ground in extremely cold climates where temperatures drop below -22 degrees Fahrenheit (-30 degrees Celsius) as a meteorological phenomenon called "diamond dust."

As ice crystals drift downwards their hexagonal faces are orientated approximately horizontally. Rays of sunlight enter through a side edge face and then exit through another edge face that is inclined 60 degrees to the first.

Taking these two refractions causes the sunlight to deviate by at least 22 degrees depending on the angle at which it entered the ice crystal, according to science site Atmospheric Optics. This causes light to ring the sun at a distance of 22degrees as sun-haloes. When the light is concentrated as spots next to the sun. also separated by 22 degrees it appears as sundogs. 

Suitably for a phenomenon with a canine-inspired moniker, sundogs can often appear with 'tails' of light stretching out from them. These tails are created by the reflection of light from the vertical sides of the flat hexagonal ice crystals.

The sundog rainbow

The inner edges of sundogs closer to the sun tend to have a reddish hue than the outer edges which are blue in color. The middles of sundogs tend to be yellow or orange. The reason for this variation in color is rooted in the physics of light that gives rise to the ordering also seen in rainbows.

Light from the sun is white and made up of light of all different colors. When it passes through a prism the white light of the sun is split into its constituent colors. 

This happens because the degree at which light is refracted when passes through a medium, in this case, the ice crystal, is refracted depends on its frequency. The variation is called the index of refraction. 

Low-frequency long-wavelength red light is refracted less strongly than high-frequency blue light so red light stays closer to the sun, while blue light is dispersed further out.

The effect is similar to that which causes a rainbow to appear with a set order of colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (which can be remembered with the simple mnemonic ROY G.BIV) through rainbows are caused by raindrops, not by ice.

If the colors in a sundog were more prominent you'd see them spreading away from the sun in this order but orientated vertically rather than horizontally as with a rainbow. 

Sundogs don't only vary in color, however. They can also come in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on the size of the ice crystals that create them. 

These hexagonal crystals rarely remain exactly horizontal as they descend through the atmosphere. Rather they wobble as they fall to Earth, the amount a crystal wobbles as it descends increases with its size. 

Crystals that wobble the most, and thus larger crystals, create sundogs that are taller. These can become so tall that eventually, they are difficult to distinguish from just fragments of a 22 degree halo around the sun.

Every dog has its day: Where and when can you see sundogs?

Sundogs can be seen worldwide and can appear at any time when the sun is above the horizon. There are, however, conditions that not only make sundogs more likely to manifest but also boost their brightness making them more likely to see.

The most obvious condition improving the quality of sundogs is the proximity of the sun to the horizon. The closer the sun is to the horizon the more conspicuous sundogs are. When the sun is high in the sky sunlight can't pass through ice crystals as easily.

Because sundogs are more common when the sun is close to the horizon, the best time to look for these solar illusions is in the morning or evening when the sun is rising or setting.

The fact that ice is key to the creation of sundogs means you are more likely to see them during winter, especially the further north you go.

That means the frigid winter mornings of December in the northern hemisphere provide the ideal time to go sundog hunting.

If you're looking for equipment to catch the perfect sundog photograph, our guides to the best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can help. 

Additional Reading

The reason we know sundogs aren't related to a god taking his dogs for a walk is probably thanks to Isaac Newton's work with optics in the 1600s. Read about what inspired Newton to experiment with prisms and light and the results these experiments delivered on the Molecular Expressions website which also allows you to play with prisms yourself.  

Bibliography

Sun Dog, Britannica, [Accessed 12/13/22], [https://www.britannica.com/science/sun-dog]

What Are Sundogs? Rainbows Beside the Sun!, Alamanac, [Accessed 12/13/22], [https://www.almanac.com/what-are-sundogs-rainbows-beside-sun]

Sun Dog Formation, Atmospheric Optics, [Accessed 12/13/22], [https://atoptics.co.uk/halo/dogfm.htm]

What Causes Halos, Sundogs and Sun Pillars?, Nation Weather Service, [Accessed 12/11/22], [https://www.weather.gov/arx/why_halos_sundogs_pillars]

Europe is warming faster than any other part of the world, and its aging fleet of weather satellites has been falling behind the forecasting demands of the new era of unpredictable climate change extremes. 

A new weather satellite, launched this week, will give Europe's meteorologists the right tools to keep tabs on unpredictable weather events, such as extreme summer storms and devastating floods, and help protect the continent's population amid the progressing climate crisis.

The spacecraft, the first of a new generation of geostationary weather satellites called Meteosat Third Generation (MTG), was developed jointly by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). Launched from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, atop an Ariane 5 rocket on Tuesday (Dec. 13), the satellite will monitor the entire European and African continents plus parts of Asia and the Middle East from a perch in geostationary orbit some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth. 

Related: Europe warming twice as fast as rest of the world, new report reveals

The new satellite, MTG Imager 1, carries instruments that have not been available to European forecasters before, including a lightning detector that will improve monitoring of summer storms and an imaging sensor that will be able to observe Earth's atmosphere in greater detail than the previous generation of Europe's weather satellites. MTG-I1's full potential, however, will be unleashed only after its two siblings, MTG-S and MTG-I2, are launched in 2024 and 2026, respectively.

Once fully deployed, the MTG fleet will deliver much more frequent weather updates than the previous generation of Europe's weather satellites. That, weather forecasters said, will help issue timelier and more accurate alerts when extreme weather hits. 

"The main advantage is that for Europe, we are going to get data every two and half minutes as opposed to every five minutes with the previous generation of satellites," Simon Koegh, the head of Space Applications and Nowcasting at British weather forecasting authority Met Office, told Space.com. "On that sort of timescale, we will get a very detailed picture in which, for example, we will be able to see summer storms develop, which frequently happens very quickly and which can drop huge amounts of intense rainfall in areas that are very vulnerable."

MTG-1, weighing 1.9 tons (1.8 metric tonnes) without its fuel, will help meteorologists keep track of such storms in multiple ways. By being able to resolve smaller cloud features, the satellite will virtually see the storms bubble up. The lightning detector will take things even further, detecting electrical activity in the clouds even before a storm reaches the size visible to the imaging instruments. As Koegh says, even small storms are capable of serious damage, and Europe's meteorologists expect to see many more of these storms than they did in the past. 

"These storms may be fairly small scale but very intense," said Koegh. "They can contain hail, which is very damaging, and extremely strong wind gusts. And because of climate change, we will see more and more of these extreme and difficult to predict events. And that means an increasing burden on weather services."

While meteorologists won't be able to stop such storms from wreaking havoc on the ground, they will be able to issue more accurate warnings, which may prevent tragedies such as those of the summer of 2021. That year, a series of powerful storms dropped amounts of rainfall unseen in 1,000 years in parts of Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. The floods triggered by those storms claimed nearly 200 lives. 

MTG satellites will also improve detection and monitoring of wildfires from space, which are also set to become more frequent in Europe in the future as summer heatwaves become more severe. 

The second MTG satellite, set to launch in 2024, will add an innovative instrument into Europe's weather monitoring toolbox that has not been flown on any geostationary weather satellite before. The instrument, an infrared sounder, will measure the temperature and amount of humidity in various layers of Earth's atmosphere by detecting infrared, heat-carrying wavelengths of light. The sounder will provide constant measurements of the entire region visible from its position. This type of data, Koegh said, will help improve the accuracy of so-called nowcasting models, the type of weather forecasting models that predict weather for the next few hours. 

The entire MTG fleet will produce 50 times more data than the current second generation of Europe's weather satellites, EUMETSAT said in a statement. The constellation cost 1.4 billion Euros to develop and build, according to the BBC. In addition, EUMETSAT member states will cover the cost of operating the fleet, which is expected to reach 2.9 billion Euros

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

NASA recently lost contact with an atmosphere-studying satellite working beyond its design lifetime.

NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) fell out of contact on Nov. 25, and the mission team has not been able to hail the spacecraft in the weeks since, agency officials wrote in a brief statement on Wednesday (Dec. 7).

"The team is currently still working to establish a connection," NASA officials wrote. "Working with the Department of Defense's Space Surveillance Network, the team has verified that ICON remains intact."

In pictures: NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer satellite mission

ICON's hardware includes a "command loss timer" designed to reset the spacecraft if it doesn't talk to ground controllers for eight days. But the spacecraft remains silent after the reset completed on Monday (Dec. 5), NASA added in the blog post.

ICON, which launched in October 2019, is exploring facets of Earth's ionosphere that other spacecraft have not looked for before. The ionosphere — a layer of Earth's atmosphere that stretches from roughly 50 miles to 400 miles (80 to 640 kilometers) above our planet — changes constantly with solar radiation. Such variations can affect communications technologies.

The mission passed its two-year prime mission in December 2021 and is working under an extended mission.

Troubleshooting continues, as the mission team explores the probable source of the issue to "problems within the avionics or radio-frequency communications subsystems," NASA officials added.

It is unclear right now whether the spacecraft will call home again, the blog post noted. "The team is currently unable to determine the health of the spacecraft, and the lack of a downlink signal could be indicative of a system failure."

Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of "Why Am I Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

Update for 8 p.m. EST on Nov. 10: The JPSS-2 satellite initially had difficulty deploying its solar arrays after reaching orbit. But that problem has been solved, and the spacecraft is now "healthy and operating as expected," NASA officials wrote in an update on Thursday evening (Nov. 10). 

The Atlas V rocket's West Coast work is done.

United Launch Alliance's (ULA) workhorse rocket lifted off today (Nov. 10) from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base at 4:49 a.m. EST (0949 GMT; 1:49 a.m. local California time), carrying two payloads toward Earth orbit. 

The Atlas V rocket lifted off with a 24-minute delay due to issues with fueling, which forced the ground control team to briefly halt the countdown. After liftoff, the Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2), separated flawlessly from the rocket's Centaur upper stage about 28 minutes into the flight. 

Shortly after launch, NASA began working on a potential telemetry glitch as they had not confirmed if the satellite's solar array deployed as expected. "Mission managers for NOAA's JPSS-2 confirm the satellite has acquired signal and is receiving and responding to commands. The satellite is currently power positive (getting electricity) and in a safe and stable configuration while teams assess the status of the solar array.," NASA wrote after launch.

JPSS-2, owned by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will gather a variety of weather and climate data once it's up and running. The second spacecraft, an inflatable heat shield technology demonstrator called LOFTID, could help NASA land super-heavy payloads on Mars down the road. 

Related: Powerful new Earth-monitoring satellite JPSS-2 to study weather's 'butterfly effect'

The Atlas V flew today in the rocket's most stripped-down configuration, without any solid rocket boosters. JPSS-2 and LOFTID were also housed in a 13-foot-wide (4 meters) payload fairing, the smallest available for an Atlas V.

The rocket's first-stage RD-180 engine burned for about 4 minutes before a nominal main engine cutoff and first-stage separation, followed by a series of burns from the Atlas V's Centaur upper stage to keep carrying the two payloads aloft. JPSS-2 was deployed about 28 minutes after liftoff into a polar orbit 440 miles (710 kilometers) above Earth. LOFTID is scheduled to deploy into a highly elliptical orbit at T+75 minutes, then head back down for a fiery reentry trial in Earth's atmosphere.

That this was the last Atlas V launch from the West Coast symbolizes a shift ahead for ULA's California launch facilities. Following today's mission, Vandenberg's Space Launch Complex 3-East will begin upgrades to facilitate launches of the company's new Vulcan Centaur rocket, which is expected to debut sometime in the first quarter of 2023. 

Launching a weather powerhouse

Today's mission also represents a shift forward for both payloads' respective technologies. JPSS-2 — a joint effort of NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — is essentially a weather satellite, but the rather banal nomenclature doesn't do justice to the spacecraft's capabilities. JPSS-2 is joining two other weather satellites in polar orbit and will be an Earth-monitoring powerhouse. 

The first satellite in the JPSS program, the Suomi-NPP spacecraft, launched in 2011. The second, NOAA-20, followed suit in 2017. (NOAA-20 was known as JPSS-1 until it reached its final orbit.) JPSS-2 is joining them to help scientists collect, and better understand, enormous amounts of meteorological data that will improve global weather models, among other uses.

"NOAA 20, Suomi-NPP, and soon JPSS-2 aid our meteorologists in meeting the National Weather Service mission for all Americans," Jordan Gerth, a meteorologist and satellite scientist for NOAA's National Weather Service, said during a prelaunch press briefing on Tuesday evening (Nov. 8). "First, JPSS data is a major input into U.S. and international global numerical weather prediction modeling systems."

Gerth used a tropical storm as a hypothetical example to explain what kind of data JPSS-2's scientific instruments will gather. 

"The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, or VIIRS instrument, provides imagery at a spatial resolution of 375 meters, or approximately a quarter mile, and enables the detection of thunderstorm features such as overshooting tops," Gerth said. Overshooting tops, he explained, can help determine the severity of a storm. VIIRS can also detect mesospheric gravity waves emanating from the center of tropical systems. 

JPSS-2 is also carrying the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS), which can see through cloud canopies to determine the interior structures of hurricane eye walls. The Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) aboard the spacecraft will work in tandem with ATMS to convert temperature and moisture data at different elevations into 3D representations for atmospheric models.

In its polar orbit, JPSS-2 will circle the globe 14 times every 24 hours, providing complete coverage of the entire planet twice daily. In addition to its weather work, the satellite, which will be operated by NOAA, is designed to monitor sea ice, ocean color, temperature, and biodiversity shifts, as well as wildfires, floods and even economic recovery efforts in areas affected by natural disasters.

Related: Climate change: Causes and effects

Testing heavy-duty Mars landing tech

JPSS-2 is designed to gather data from orbit for at least seven years. The other payload that went up on the Atlas V today, LOFTID (short for "Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator"), didn't operate for nearly that long.

LOFTID is based on hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (HIAD) technology. It tested the capabilities and performance of an expandable heat shield during reentry through a planetary atmosphere. Expandable heat shields have high potential benefits for the future of spaceflight, NASA officials say, potentially allowing much heavier payloads to be landed safely on the surface of Mars than is currently possible. The agency will need such heavy-duty landing tech to build a research outpost on the Red Planet, which it hopes to start doing in the late 2030s or early 2040s.

LOFTID is packed with sensors, which will help mission team members characterize the vehicle's fiery return to Earth. LOFTID likely reached a maximum speed of nearly 18,000 mph (30,000 kph) during that descent, which ended with a parachute-aided splashdown a few hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii about 110 minutes after liftoff today as planned.

"During entry," Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, said during Tuesday's briefing, "LOFTID will also be taking a number of measurements across a suite of instruments, including temperatures across the aeroshell, pressures and heat flux on the nose cap, as well as 360-degree video on six video cameras, and IR data from 12 infrared cameras. We'll also be able to get an aerial mapping of temperature from the fiber optics strain sensor, or FOSS, which will be on the nose of the vehicle." 

LOFTID also was designed to eject an additional data core during its fall to Earth.

Though no more Atlas V vehicles will launch from Vandenberg, the rocket isn't ready for retirement yet. There are still a lot of Atlas V missions left on ULA's books, but all of them will fly from Florida's Space Coast.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 3 p.m. EST to include new details on JPSS-2's power status, then again at 8 p.m. EST to note that LOFTID came back to Earth safely as planned.

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NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are set to launch a new weather and climate monitoring satellite early Thursday (Nov. 10), and you can watch the action live.

The Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2) spacecraft is scheduled to lift off Thursday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 4:25 a.m. EST (0925 GMT; 1:25 a.m. local California time) atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Watch it here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency; coverage will begin at 3:45 a.m. EST (0845 GMT).

The launch may be visible from broad swaths of the California coast, weather permitting. So if you live in the Golden State and are a night owl (or a very early riser), you might want to go outside and look up at the appointed time.

Related: Powerful new Earth-monitoring satellite JPSS-2 to study weather's 'butterfly effect'

JPSS-2 will be operated by NOAA once it reaches its final destination, a path in low Earth orbit that takes it over the planet's poles. Two other JPSS spacecraft already study Earth from that orbit, circling the globe 14 times every 24 hours and fully surveying the planet twice a day.

JPSS-2's instrument suite will collect data about Earth's surface temperatures, cloud densities and aerosols in order to improve weekly weather forecasts and severe weather predictions, among other uses.

In a prelaunch press briefing held on Tuesday (Nov. 9), Jordan Gerth, meteorologist and satellite scientist for NOAA's National Weather Service, explained that JPSS-2's contributions, while global in scope, also have very localized applications. 

"The observations are global. The predictions are local," Gerth said. "With JPSS, the quality of local three- to seven-day weather forecasts is outstanding."

In addition to better helping you decide whether or not to grab your umbrella before heading out the door, JPSS-2 will also monitor sea ice, algae blooms, wildfires, ocean surface temperatures and temperatures in Earth's atmosphere to contribute data to an archive of climate research for global weather models. 

JPSS-2 will launch atop an Atlas V 401, a bare-minimum variation of the workhorse rocket with a 13-foot-wide (4 meters) payload fairing, no solid rocket boosters and a single RL10-1 engine powering the vehicle's Centaur upper stage. This Atlas V also happens to be the last to ever launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base. 

"We're launching the last Atlas V from the West Coast, enabling ULA to have some huge capability out of here with their Vulcan vehicle," Capt. Zack Zounes, launch weather officer for the U.S. Space Force, said during an Oct. 28 JPSS-2 briefing. (Vulcan is ULA's next-generation rocket, which is scheduled to debut in 2023.)

Tucked underneath JPSS-2 inside the Atlas V's fairing is another payload, NASA's Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID). LOFTID is a technology demonstration of an expandable heat shield designed to protect heavy payloads during atmospheric entries. 

Punching a spacecraft through planetary atmospheres is one of the most difficult feats to accomplish in spaceflight, and heat shields are often among a spacecraft's heaviest components. Inflatable heat shields have the potential to greatly increase the maximum payload mass NASA can land on Mars and other planets, agency officials have said. LOFTID's flight will provide crucial data about how such hardware performs in the harsh reentry environment.

Joe Del Corso, LOFTID project manager at NASA's Langley Research Center, explained LOFTID's reentry procedure. 

"After delivering JPSS-2 to Earth orbit, the Centaur second stage will deorbit the LOFTID vehicle, turn the LOFTID vehicle on, and then LOFTID will then inflate the aeroshell and be released by the Centaur," Del Corso said during Tuesday's media call.

Traveling nearly 29 times the speed of sound, LOFTID's reentry will be recorded by a host of onboard sensors, whose data collection will include "temperatures across the aeroshell, pressures and heat flux on the nose cap, as well as 360-degree video on six video cameras, and IR data from 12 infrared cameras," Del Corso explained. LOFTID will eventually splash down softly under parachutes, and teams hope to recover its payloads intact.

The JPSS-2 launch was originally scheduled for Nov. 1 but was delayed to allow launch teams to replace a battery on the Centaur.

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Update: This story was updated at 5:11 p.m. EDT Nov. 3 to reflect a new launch date of Nov. 10 at 4:25 a.m. EST (0925 GMT).

A powerful new Earth-monitoring satellite will have to stay on its home planet a little longer.

The Joint Polar Satellite System-2 satellite, or JPSS-2 for short, was supposed to launch atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday (Nov. 1). 

Subsequently, NASA and ULA announced that the launch team needs to replace a battery on the Atlas V's Centaur upper stage and was next targeted for Nov. 9, NASA said last week. But now that date has been pushed back again, as ULA announced Tuesday (Nov. 3) the launch date will be Nov. 10 at 4:25 a.m. EST.

Related: Powerful new Earth-monitoring satellite JPSS-2 to study weather's 'butterfly effect'

JPSS-2 will be operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The satellite will launch to a polar orbit around Earth, from which it will study our planet with five different science instruments.

JPSS-2's data will aid scientists in a variety of ways, from improving weather forecasts to monitoring the impacts of climate change, mission team members have said.

Also packed atop the Atlas V is an inflatable heat shield called the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID). LOFTID will ride to orbit, then come back to Earth at high speed before deploying parachutes and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

Researchers will study how LOFTID performs during this test run, to assess the potential of inflatable heat shields to land heavy payloads on Mars and other planets.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

A powerful weather satellite is all set to launch early Tuesday morning (Nov. 1) — provided the weather cooperates.

The Joint Polar Satellite System-2 satellite, or JPSS-2 for short, and its United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket passed their launch readiness review, mission team members announced on Friday (Oct. 28).

The milestone keeps the duo on track to lift off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday at 5:25 a.m. EDT (0925 GMT; 2:25 a.m. local California time). You can watch the liftoff live here at Space.com when the time comes, courtesy of ULA.

Related: Powerful new Earth-monitoring satellite JPSS-2 to study weather's 'butterfly effect'

There must also be good weather on Tuesday, however, and that's far from a guarantee on the chilly, often foggy Central California coast. Indeed, the latest forecast gives just a 40% chance that Mother Nature will let JPSS-2 get off the ground on Tuesday.

One of the main concerns is thick clouds, which can serve as a spawning ground for lightning during a launch.

"Rocket-triggered lightning occurs when a cloud has an electric field," Capt. Zack Zounes, a launch weather officer with the U.S. Space Force, said during a JPSS-2 press conference on Friday afternoon. "It's not strong enough for lightning, but if you add a conductive object like a rocket to the electric field, it enhances it."

If JPSS-2 can't fly on Tuesday, the mission's next opportunity will come on Wednesday (Nov. 2). There's a 60% chance of good weather on that backup day, Zounes said.

JPSS-2 is the third satellite in the Joint Polar Satellite System, a partnership between the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. As the name suggests, these spacecraft orbit Earth around the poles, helping researchers keep tabs on the planet's weather and climate.

JPSS-2 is outfitted with five instruments, which will gather a variety of data about our planet. This information will improve weather forecasts and aid scientists' efforts to understand and monitor the impacts of climate change, among other uses, NASA and NOAA officials have said.

You can read more about JPSS-2's instruments and the work they will do in our science story.

Also going up on the Atlas V on Tuesday is a technology demonstration called the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID). 

LOFTID is an inflatable heat shield, a type of structure that researchers think could help extremely heavy payloads touch down safely on Mars and other planets. LOFTID will deploy from the Atlas V's upper stage about 75 minutes after liftoff and then come screaming back into Earth's atmosphere, letting scientists and engineers see how this potential landing tech performs in an extreme environment.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

The third in a series of five polar-orbiting satellites developed by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to study Earth's weather and environment will launch on Tuesday (Nov. 1).

Riding atop an Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the JPSS-2 satellite, part of the Joint Polar Satellite System, will blast off to provide meteorologists and climatologists important data to help predict extreme weather events and to better understand how these events affect our planet.

JPSS-2 will join the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP), which launched in 2011, and NOAA-20, which launched in 2017 as JPSS-1, in polar orbit around Earth. JPSS-2 will be renamed NOAA-21 once it is in orbit and conducting scientific operations. Two further launches, JPSS-3 and JPSS-4, are planned for 2027 and 2032, respectively.

Related: Earth tells us to 'GO' in weird cloud message seen from space (photo)

In their polar orbits, the satellites circle the Earth 14 times per day. From this vantage point, "JPSS-2 will observe every place on Earth at least twice a day as the satellite orbits the Earth from pole to pole," Tim Walsh, director of NOAA's JPSS program, said during a news conference held on Oct. 4. "To predict weather, we really need to be able to observe Earth's atmosphere from this global perspective."

To accomplish its mission, JPSS-2 will carry five key instruments into orbit, most of which are also on Suomi NPP and NOAA-20.

Two of these instruments, the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) and the Cross-Track Infrared Sounder (CrIS), will monitor atmospheric temperature and moisture content, "giving weather forecasters a global 3D picture of … the most fundamental information required by forecast models," Walsh said.

The two instruments will complement each other. CrIS is limited in how far it can see into clouds because water vapor absorbs infrared light, but ATMS' microwave instrument can penetrate those clouds, allowing the instrument to see into the hearts of storms.

Another instrument is called Libera, which will play the same role that the less advanced Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument does on Suomi NPP and NOAA-20. These instruments study the energy balance of Earth's surface and atmosphere, or how much energy is absorbed by Earth's surface and atmosphere versus how much is emitted back into space, and how this affects temperatures on Earth.

The Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) will observe the ozone layer, looking for holes and how the concentration of ozone and other aerosols varies globally.

Finally, the Visual Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is "essentially the eyes of the satellite," Walsh said. VIIRS will capture imagery of Earth's surface, oceans and atmosphere in visible and infrared light, revealing how much snow and ice covers the planet, how much of the planet is covered by clouds (which can affect the energy balance), where fog shrouds the skies, the color of the ocean and how that relates to the abundance of microscopic phytoplankton, the health of vegetation based on the presence of chlorophyll, and the behavior of hurricanes, floods, wildfires and dust storms. 

In particular, the Joint Polar Satellite System project focuses on observing extreme weather events to understand them better. For example, Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the Caribbean, Cuba and the southeast United States at the end of September, initially began as a tropical atmospheric wave off the coast of West Africa.

"A storm in Africa can affect the development of a hurricane that hits the East Coast ; a typhoon in Japan can cause heavy rain in California several days later," Walsh said.

This "butterfly effect" shows how interconnected Earth's weather systems really are; the Joint Polar Satellite System project's mission is to try to disentangle the factors that influence Earth's weather and environment on a global scale.

Follow Keith Cooper on Twitter @21stCenturySETI. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

An astronaut onboard the International Space Station (ISS) has snapped a peculiar image of Earth from space that contains two bizarre blue blobs of light glimmering in our planet's atmosphere. The dazzling pair may look otherworldly. But in reality, they are the result of two unrelated natural phenomena that just happened to occur at the same time.

The image was captured last year by an unnamed member of the Expedition 66 crew as the ISS passed over the South China Sea. The photo was released online Oct. 9 by NASA's Earth Observatory. 

The first blob of light, which is visible at the bottom of the image, is a massive lightning strike somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand. Lightning strikes are typically hard to see from the ISS, as they're usually covered by clouds. But this particular strike occurred next to a large, circular gap in the top of the clouds, which caused the lightning to illuminate the surrounding walls of the cloudy caldera-like structure, creating a striking luminous ring.   

Related: Upward-shooting 'blue jet' lightning spotted from International Space Station 

The second blue blob, which can be seen in the top right of the image, is the result of warped light from the moon. The orientation of Earth's natural satellite in relation to the ISS means the light it reflects back from the sun passes straight through the planet's atmosphere, which transforms it into a bright blue blob with a fuzzy halo. This effect is caused by some of the moonlight scattering off tiny particles in Earth's atmosphere, according to Earth Observatory.

Different colors of visible light have different wavelengths, which affects their interaction with atmospheric particles. Blue light has the shortest wavelength and is therefore the most likely to scatter, which caused the moon to turn blue in this image. The same effect also explains why the sky appears blue during the daytime: because blue wavelengths of sunlight scatter the most and become more visible to the human eye, according to NASA. 

Also visible in the photo is a glowing web of artificial lights coming from Thailand. The other prominent sources of light pollution in the image are emitted from Vietnam and Hainan Island, the southernmost region of China, though these light sources are largely obscured by clouds. The orange halo parallel to the curvature of the Earth is the edge of the atmosphere, which is commonly known as "Earth's limb" when viewed from space, according to Earth Observatory. 

Originally published on Live Science.

The sky turns dark, a heavy rain falls and a bolt of lightning crackles through the air. But instead of striking down toward the ground, or zipping sideways between clouds, this lightning bolt does something unexpected: It blasts straight upward from the top of the cloud, shooting 50 miles (80 kilometers) into the sky, grazing the lower edge of space.

Bolts like these are called gigantic jets. They are the rarest and most powerful sort of lightning, occurring as few as 1,000 times a year and emitting more than 50 times as much energy as a typical lightning bolt — and now, scientists have just detected the single most powerful gigantic jet yet.

In a study published Aug. 3 in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed a gigantic jet that shot out of a cloud over Oklahoma in 2018. By studying the jet's radio-wave emissions using satellite and radar data, the team learned that the bolt moved approximately 300 coulombs of energy from the top of the cloud to the lower ionosphere — the layer of charged particles that separates Earth's upper atmosphere from the vacuum of space — or roughly 60 times the 5-coulomb output of a typical lightning bolt.

"The charge transfer is nearly double the previous largest by a gigantic jet and is comparable to the largest ever recorded for cloud-to-ground strokes," the researchers wrote in the study.

Related: What's the longest lightning bolt ever recorded?

Capturing such detailed data on the massive stroke of lightning required an equally massive stroke of luck. A citizen scientist based in Hawley, Texas filmed the jet with a low-light camera on May 14, 2018, watching as the gargantuan discharge shot out of a cloud top before connecting with charged particles in the ionosphere, some 60 miles (96 km) above the ground.

Scientists analyzing the footage found that, as luck would have it, the jet occurred very near the center of a large lightning mapping array (LMA) — a network of ground-based radio antennas used to map the locations and times of lightning strikes. The jet was also within range of several weather radar systems, as well as a weather-watching satellite network.

With these sources combined, the researchers studied the size, shape and energy output of the gigantic jet in unprecedented detail. The researchers found that the jet's highest-frequency radio-wave emissions (the kind that LMAs are built to detect) came from small structures called streamers, which develop at the very tip of a lightning bolt and create a "direct electrical connection between the cloud top and the lower ionosphere," lead study author Levi Boggs, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, said in a statement.

The strongest electric current, meanwhile, flowed considerably behind the streamers, in a section called the leader. The data also showed that while the streamers were relatively cool, with a temperature of roughly 400 degrees Fahrenheit (204 degrees Celsius), the leader was scorching hot, with a temperature of more than 8,000 degrees F (4,426 C). This discrepancy is true of all lightning strikes, not just gigantic jets, the researchers wrote.

So, why does lightning sometimes blast up instead of down? Scientists still aren't totally clear on that, but it likely involves some sort of blockage that prevents lightning from escaping through the bottom of a cloud; gigantic jets are typically observed in storms that don't produce many cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, the team added. 

For whatever reason, there is usually a suppression of cloud-to-ground discharges," Boggs said. "In the absence of the lightning discharges we normally see, the gigantic jet may relieve the buildup of excess negative charge in the cloud."

Gigantic jets are also reported most frequently in tropical regions, the team noted. This makes the record-breaking jet over Oklahoma all the more remarkable; the jet was not part of a tropical storm system. More research — and a lot more luck — is needed to understand these epic, upside-down lightning strikes.

Originally published on Live Science.

Noctilucent clouds are rare high-altitude clouds visible only under certain conditions. They form during the summer months and appear after sunset as delicate, wispy blue or silver streaks across the sky.

The name noctilucent is derived from the Latin words "nocto" and "lucent" which translates to "night" and "shining" respectively, according to Merriam Webster. They are sometimes referred to as polar mesospheric clouds.

These unique night-shining clouds captivate skywatchers during the summer months. In this article we delve into what they are, how they form, and how you can see them for yourself. 

Related: Astrophotography for beginners. How to shoot the night sky 

Noctilucent cloud formation and location

Most of our planet's clouds form in the Earth's atmosphere layer closest to Earth — the troposphere — at altitudes between about 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) and 11.4 miles (18 km). But noctilucent clouds take things to a whole new level (quite literally). 

Noctilucent clouds are located in the third layer of Earth's atmosphere — the mesosphere — where they form between 47 to 53 miles (76 to 85 km) above the surface, making them Earth's highest clouds. 

For noctilucent clouds to form they require water vapor, dust and very low temperatures (like many clouds), according to the U.K. Met Office. 

Noctilucent clouds are visible during the summer months when the mesosphere is at its coldest at the poles, according to Earth Sky. When temperatures are low enough, water vapor freezes onto the dust particles, forming ice crystals. When the sun illuminates them from below, these ice crystals reflect the sunlight and appear as electric blue wisps in the night sky, reaching out toward the edge of space. 

But where does all this dust come from in the mesosphere? According to the Met Office, mesospheric dust can originate from space as tiny meteors or come from Earth from volcanic eruptions or pollutant emissions. These strange clouds were first mentioned in 1885, two years after the Krakatoa volcanic eruption, according to ESA. 

How to see noctilucent clouds

Not everyone is lucky enough to be in a position to see these night-shining clouds as they are only visible at latitudes between 45 degrees and 80 degrees north and south, according to the Met Office.

There is a relatively small observation window for noctilucent clouds as they are only visible after sunset during astronomical twilight during the summer months.

To increase your chances of spotting these impressive night-shining clouds, find a clear patch of sky after sunset. For some helpful tips and suggested camera settings, the travel photography site Meandering Wild has a useful article to help noctilucent cloud photographers. To record the dynamic beauty of these clouds you may also want to set up a low-light capable video camera to capture a timelapse. 

Noctilucent clouds aren't just a wonder experienced by those of us on Earth — they also put on a show for orbiting astronauts on the International Space Station. In 2016, ESA astronaut Tim Peake captured an image of noctilucent clouds shimmering high above Earth's surface, from the orbital lab. 

Noctilucent clouds Q&A with an expert

We asked David Hopper, a scientist with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) who is based at the RAL Space department, some frequently asked questions about noctilucent clouds. 

Are noctilucent clouds appearing more frequently?

Scientists have found that the frequency of noctilucent clouds fluctuates each year due to changes in the atmosphere and solar cycle, but all in all the clouds are becoming increasingly common. 

A study published in July 2018, in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters explains that the increased frequency of these night-shining clouds is due to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, specifically, methane. 

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that produces water vapor — a key ingredient of noctilucent clouds — through chemical reactions, namely oxidization within the troposphere by the hydroxyl radical (OH), according to the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

Throughout the period of the study, 1871 to 2008, the scientist found that methane emissions had more than doubled the amount of mesospheric ice present, thus increasing the likelihood of noctilucent cloud formation. 

"People living in the mid to high latitudes now have a good chance of seeing noctilucent clouds several times each summer," Franz-Josef Lübken, an atmospheric scientist at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Kühlungsborn, Germany, said in a statement. "In the 19th century, they were probably visible only once every several decades or so."

2022 was a particularly good year for noctilucent cloud displays as NASA's AIM (Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere) spacecraft — with a primary goal to study how these clouds form — detected the highest increase in noctilucent cloud frequency in 15 years. 

So why the sudden increase? The emerging theory is that rocket launches are to blame. 

During a rocket launch, water vapor is released into the atmosphere. The water vapor then wafts up to the mesosphere, over the course of about ten days according to Cora Randall, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, in a statement on spaceweather.com. 

"We're speculating that the spike might be due to extra water vapor transported to higher latitudes from rocket launches," says Randall. "But much more quantitative analysis would be required to confirm that or not."

Though only speculation, the timing seems to fit with a recent outbreak of noctilucent clouds occurring about 10 days after a series of rocket launches. 

In June 2022 SpaceX launched three missions in just over 36 hours, the third being a launch of the Globalstar satellite on June 19. Approximately 10 days after the launch on June 30 an outbreak of noctilucent clouds was documented by spaceweather.com. Many took to Twitter in the days following to share their noctilucent cloud-watching experience. 

A recent study using NASA's AIM satellite came to a similar conclusion that rocket launches and noctilucent cloud formation are related.

Researchers took things one step further to look at how the timing of rocket launches affected noctilucent cloud formation at specific latitudes. They found that morning rocket launches are partly responsible for the appearance of noctilucent clouds at lower latitudes, according to a statement from NASA. 

"The analysis revealed a strong correlation between the number of launches that took place between 11 p.m. and 10 a.m. local time and the frequency of mid-latitude noctilucent clouds observed between 56 and 60 degrees north latitude." said the statement. 

Noctilucent clouds are not the only pretty skyward side effect of rocket launches. Other captivating patterns in the sky have been reported by observers all around the world, including a strange blue spiral in New Zealand and 'space jellyfish' off the Florida coast. 

Additional information

For more information on noctilucent clouds head over to the British Astronomical Association for a beginners' guide to the high atmosphere clouds. If you want more beautiful noctilucent cloud imagery check out NASA's AIM mission image gallery. Explore noctilucent clouds on other planets with this Earth Sky article about night-shining clouds on Mars. 

Bibliography

Lübken, Franz-Josef, Uwe Berger, and Gerd Baumgarten. "On the anthropogenic impact on long-term evolution of noctilucent clouds." Geophysical Research Letters 45.13 (2018): 6681-6689.

American Geophysical Union. (2018, July 2). Climate change is making night-shining clouds more visible. Phys.org. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.phys.org/news/2018-07-climate-night-shining-clouds-visible.html

Climate science of methane. The Environmental Change Institute. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/energy/downloads/methaneuk/chapter02.pdf

How to find and photograph noctilucent clouds. Meandering Wild. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.meanderingwild.com/photographing-noctilucent-clouds/

Loff, S. (Ed.). (2017, August 7). Space station view of noctilucent clouds. NASA. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.nasa.gov/image-feature/space-station-view-of-noctilucent-clouds

Merriam-Webster. Noctilucent Cloud Definition & meaning. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noctilucent%20cloud

Noctilucent clouds. Met Office. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/types-of-weather/clouds/other-clouds/noctilucent

Noctilucent clouds: The most in 15 years! EarthSky. (July 3, 2022). Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.earthsky.org/earth/night-shining-clouds-noctilucent-clouds-how-they-form-how-to-see-them

Silver linings. ESA. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/07/Silver_linings

A sudden increase in noctilucent clouds. Spaceweather.com Time Machine. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=03&month=07&year=2022

Thomas, V. (July 22, 2022). Rocket launches can create night-shining clouds away from the Poles. NASA. Retrieved July 25, 2022, from www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/sun/rocket-launches-can-create-night-shining-clouds-away-from-poles-nasa-aim-mission 

Red lightning, also known as a "sprite", is an intriguing weather phenomenon associated with certain very intense thunderstorms. While an ordinary lightning flash extends downward from the clouds to the ground, a sprite shoots way up into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. 

However, red lightning it only lasts for a millisecond or so, which makes it difficult to observe and study. Here’s a look at what scientists have learned so far about the phenomenon.

Related: Space weather: What is it and how is it predicted?

What are lightning sprites?

Given their elusive nature, "sprite" is an appropriate name, although this is actually an acronym that stands for: Stratospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification. Like regular lightning, red lightning is caused by a build-up of electrical charge in clouds, but in this case the excess charge is released to the ionosphere — around 50 miles (81 kilometers) up — rather than to the ground. 

Sprites are usually red in colour, and can range in shape between a jellyfish and a carrot. Compared to an ordinary flash of lightning they can be huge in size, often as much as 30 miles (48 km) across.

Although it looks so striking when captured in a photograph, red lightning isn’t easy to observe from the ground, because it occurs high above the cloud layer. It can be observed more clearly from high-altitude planes, including specially instrumented research aircraft and it's also been observed by astronauts on the International Space Station. 

Red lightning isn’t the only upper-atmosphere phenomenon that can be triggered by thunderstorms. Collectively known as Transient Luminous Events, or TLEs, other examples include blue jets, which are optical ejections from the core region of a thunderstorm, and "elves" (Emission of Light and Very low frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic pulse Sources), which are rapidly expanding disc-shaped regions of luminosity.

Red lightning sprites in space

In common with many weather phenomena, red lightning could in principle occur on other planets that have an atmosphere, not just Earth. It’s been known, for example, that ordinary lightning is a common occurrence in Jupiter’s atmosphere ever since NASA’s Voyager 1 probe flew past the giant planet in 1979.

In the case of sprites specifically, researchers at Tel Aviv University carried out an experiment in 2011 to test whether they could occur on Jupiter, its neighbouring gas giant Saturn, and our own near-neighbour Venus. 

They re-created the atmospheres of these planets in their laboratory and passed electrical discharges through them. They found that under the right conditions, sprites could form on all three planets. In the case of Jupiter, the theory was finally confirmed in 2020, when observations from NASA's Juno spacecraft showed that both sprites and elves do indeed occur in the planet's upper atmosphere.

Observing sprites from space

Anecdotal accounts of lightning-like phenomena occurring above thunderstorms go back to the 19th century, but it was only in the 1950s, when red lightning was observed from airliners, and tentative physical theories were described, that it entered the scientific domain. 

The first photograph of a sprite was taken by accident 1989, when a team from the University of Minnesota recorded an upward flash from the cloud tops while they were testing a low-light TV camera. 

Over the next few years, video recordings made by astronauts on the Space Shuttle captured several more examples, placing the phenomenon on a much firmer observational footing.

Additional resources

For more information about weather phenomena check out, "An Introduction to Space Weather" by Mark Moldwin and "Space Weather Fundamentals" by George V. Khazanov. 

Bibliography

• Meghan Gambino, "Scientists Capture Rare Photographs of Red Lightning", Smithsonian magazine, August 2013. 
• Kristine De Abreu, "Natural Wonders: Sprite Lightning", ExplorersWeb, January 2022.  
• University of Alaska, "Red Sprites, Blue Jets and Elves" accessed July 2022. 
• Deborah Byrd, "What are lightning sprites?", EarthSky, August 2020. 
• NASA, "Juno Solves 39-Year Old Mystery of Jupiter Lightning", June 2018. 
•  Jeremy Thomas, "UW Sprite Balloon Experiment 2002", University of Washington, October 2002. 
• EarthSky, "Jupiter, Saturn and Venus might have lightning sprites, too", July 2012. 

Scientists will soon have a powerful new set of eyes in the sky to study Earth's weather and climate.

The GOES-T satellite lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today (March 1) at 4:38 p.m. EST (2138 GMT), riding a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket into the final frontier. GOES-T deployed as planned from the Atlas V's upper stage about 3.5 hours after liftoff, ULA representatives confirmed this evening via Twitter.

GOES-T is the latest spacecraft in the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) $11.7 billion, four-satellite Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-R series. The satellite is headed for geostationary orbit, about 22,300 miles (35,900 kilometers) above our planet.

GOES-T will do a variety of work from that perch, helping scientists keep tabs on weather systems and natural hazards across a broad stretch of the Western Hemisphere.

Related: The top 10 views of Earth from space

GOES-T will be renamed GOES-18 after reaching geostationary orbit. It will then begin a lengthy commissioning period.

"Initially, it will be placed at the longitude of 89.5 [degrees] west, which is for the central United States, where it will begin its post-launch testing. It will continue that testing for a couple of months," Dan Lindsey, GOES-R program scientist at NOAA, said during a televised press conference on Friday (Feb. 25.)

"Then, in May, it will be drifted over to the west position, approximately 137 [degrees] west, which is over the east Pacific Ocean," Lindsay continued. "Then in early 2023, the current plan is for GOES-18 to replace GOES-17." 

GOES-17, which launched in 2018, is operational but experiencing a cooling problem on its Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument. When GOES-18 comes fully online, GOES-17 will be placed in orbital storage, and the new spacecraft will take its place as the GOES West satellite. (Yes, the naming system is confusing.) It will work in tandem with GOES East to study half of the planet, from New Zealand to the west coast of Africa, NOAA officials said.

GOES-T's ground applications will include looking for the effects of storms across the Pacific Ocean and wildfires throughout the western United States, including Alaska and Hawaii. 

"It's also able to check the smoke," Lindsay said. "This is really important, because as we all know, we've had very active wildfire seasons in the last few years, especially in the western United States."

"Forecasters and emergency managers are able to use this data," Lindsay continued, "to detect the hotspots and then warn the firefighters and the public about where the fire is and also where the smoke is going. It's really important to track the smoke and keep track of that for air quality and other potential hazards." 

Lindsay also mentioned planes as one potential hazard vector that GOES-T will seek to manage, through looking for dangerous aerosols on flight paths.

GOES-T also sports an advanced lightning mapper — an updated version of the one on previous GOES-R satellites — that is optimized to see atomic oxygen. Atomic oxygen gets excited by temperatures and pressures that occur during lightning strikes, Tewa Kpulun, Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) science lead at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin, said in the same press conference.

GLM has three optical filters that can remove solar glare, allowing the instrument to see "lightning during the day without capturing any excess light, a feat much more difficult than seeing it dazzling in the dark," Kpulun said. 

The GLM data, Kpulun added, "means that we get better details on lightning strikes before the storm fully evolves, which forecasters use to predict how and where dangerous weather may intensify."

The satellite will also assist other missions in monitoring space weather such as solar storms, to protect satellites, power grids and other infrastructure. And it will image the full disc of the Earth every 10 minutes using its Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument.

ABI has 16 spectral bands ranging from visible to infrared wavelengths, said Daniel Gall, ABI chief systems engineer at L3Harris Technologies. "This [instrument] provides three times the spectral information, four times the spatial resolution and five times faster coverage than the previous generation of those imagers," Gall said during the press conference.

GOES-T has several technical improvements over previous GOES-R satellites, said Candace Carlisle, GOES-R flight project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

For example, GOES-T's ABI instrument has a redesigned radiator to improve thermal control. Reliability will be increased on both the propulsion system and the lightning mapper due to new electronics and other changes. The satellite's magnetometer will also be more accurate than previous magnetometers thanks to improved stability, Carlisle added.

The first images from GOES-T, assuming commissioning goes well, should be flowing back to Earth around May or June. Mission officials declined to publicly answer a question about whether they will share information with Russia, a country that is under U.S. sanctions at the moment due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

"We are going to keep [the conversation] about the science of GOES-T," Lindsay said in response to the question, but added that officials would do an offline follow-up with the reporter asking about the matter.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 8:13 p.m. EST on Tuesday (March 1) with news that GOES-T had deployed successfully.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

The GOES-T satellite is ready to take its place as part of the U.S.'s most sophisticated weather and environmental observation system.

The satellite, which will be operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will launch on Tuesday (March 1) aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket blasting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A two-hour launch window opens at 4:38 p.m. EST (2138 GMT) and NASA will livestream the launch, which you can also watch here on Space.com.

These satellites are "huge advancements in technology," James Yoe, a satellite scientist with the National Weather Service, told Space.com. "We're still learning how to exploit these satellites fully."

Related: 10 devastating signs of climate change satellites can see from space

The $11.7 billion GOES-R series, officially known as the Geostationary Environmental Observational Satellite – R Series, are a network of geostationary satellites and a collaborative program between NOAA and NASA. The satellites carry a comprehensive array of equipment to capture complex weather, climate and environmental data from high above the Earth.

GOES-T, which will become GOES-18 once it reaches orbit, will join GOES-16, which was launched in 2016 and is serving as the GOES-East satellite. The new spacecraft will replace GOES-17, which is currently serving as GOES-West. Together, GOES East and West cover much of the Western Hemisphere, from New Zealand to the western coast of Africa. GOES-17 will become a standby satellite once GOES-18 is active; the new satellite is expected to operate until about 2030.

GOES-T will carry largely the same array of technology as previous GOES-R satellites, but its Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), the main weather imaging system on the satellite, includes an upgraded cooling system. The ABI on GOES-17 glitched shortly after its launch in 2018 and does not work properly when it is directly facing the sun, which happens at times during the spring and fall. 

The new satellite will also have an improved magnetometer, which can detect variations in the Earth's magnetic field. Along with other instruments on the satellite, the magnetometer will help detect space weather, which can cause power, communications and navigational outages on Earth. Space weather is expected to strengthen as the sun reaches the peak of its 11-year activity cycle around 2025.

Data from GOES satellites' ABI instruments enables reliable weather forecasting, severe storm warnings and hurricane tracking. The satellites also carry a lightning tracker, which helps accurately forecast thunderstorm, hail and tornadoes. Along with being a crucial source of weather data, GOES satellites collect a wide variety Earth observations, including information on the atmosphere and oceans.

"More and more, we find we're able to use the imager, for example, to help us detect and fight wildfires, because it's so much more sensitive than the previous imager," Yoe told Space.com. He said the lightning mapper even detected a meteor that burned up over Pittsburgh on New Years' Day, even though the system wasn't designed to detect meteors.

"We're still learning all the time how to use these instruments," he said.

The satellites will also be an important tool in continuing to monitor global climate change, from tracking changes in Earth's clouds to observing the impacts of climate change on Earth's surface, like changes in vegetation and wildfire frequency. Although NOAA is already developing the next-generation satellites that will follow, like the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellites, the GOES-R satellites still carry advanced instruments that offer ever-expanding contributions to weather forecasting and climate science.

"What we have right now is really, truly advanced and state of the art," said Yoe. 

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Geoengineering is the use of technology to alter Earth's climate. It may have become the topic of daily small talk, but the weather and its changing states has a big impact on individuals, localized areas and our planet as a whole. 

In some countries, the prolonged lack of rain creates harsh, dry conditions, while others are constantly threatened by surges of floodwater. 

Severe weather varies drastically from country to country, but one change in climate is common worldwide– global temperatures continue to steadily increase. 

Related: Geoengineering Earth's atmosphere: How it could affect astronomy 

Why do some scientists support geoengineering?

As modern technology advances and our understanding of meteorological processes grows, scientists are discovering new ways to control the weather. Instead of succumbing to nature's schedule, projects are in place to make the skies rain, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and prevent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and flooding. 

The reasons for weather manipulation can vary from the convenient to the essential. Geoengineering is the term used to describe the manipulation of weather to combat the effects of global warming. These methods are generally split into two categories– carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering.

Controlling the weather from space

Geoengineering projects are all created to change Earth's climate. While many are intended for use on ocean surfaces and in Earth's atmosphere, not all of these projects are designed to function on our planet. 

Space geoengineering involves taking a large step back from Earth, in an attempt to make more significant alterations. Entering into space means being closer to the sun, and so much of the geoengineering technology envisaged for Earth's orbit involves manipulating the sunlight that illuminates our planet. 

Can we block the sun?

The first idea for this form of space-based technology came from engineer James Early in 1989. His concept involved building a giant glass sheet of 2,000 kilometres in width, according to the British Interplanetary Society. 

When orbiting Earth, this glass structure would serve as a barrier between the sun and Earth, reflecting sunlight back into space and reducing the radiation that entered Earth's atmosphere. This substantially sized, solid structure would be incredibly expensive to fly to space and would likely need to be assembled in space. In space assembly technology is something that is currently being experimented with, according to the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics. 

As we have no long-term human presence on another planetary body, some of today’s scientists have envisaged a more manageable array of smaller mirror satellites and areas of dense asteroid dust to serve as a solar barrier. 

Additional resources

You can read more about solar geoengineering with this explainer article from Carbon Brief. Explore Geoengineering even further with this educational material from Harvard University. For more information about geoengineering in space, NASA has answered 5 common questions about hacking the planet. 

Bibliography

• Oxford Geoengineering Programme, "What is Geoengineering" http://www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk 
• McInnes, Colin R. "Space-based geoengineering: challenges and requirements." Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science 224.3 (2010): 571-580. 
• Baum, Chad M., Sean Low, and Benjamin K. Sovacool. "Between the sun and us: Expert perceptions on the innovation, policy, and deep uncertainties of space-based solar geoengineering." Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 158 (2022): 112179. 

A band of snow blankets the United States northeast in a new satellite photo showing the huge storm stranding motorists on Interstate 95 in Virginia.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite captured the storm, which dumped more than 14 inches (36 centimeters) of snow on parts of southern Virginia and southern Maryland.

Motorists were stuck up to 24 hours on Virginia's Interstate 95, one of the busiest stretches of the highway in the country, as jackknifed tractor-trailers and other accidents caused a large backup of traffic over dozens of miles.

"It's been so horrible," Arlin Tellez, 22, told The New York Times. Tellez was stranded in her car from 5 p.m. local time Monday (Jan. 3) overnight through Tuesday (Jan. 4) with no food or water and only a few sets of clothes in the car.

Related: Hubble telescope sees a space 'snowman' thousands of light-years away

"There's just no way for us to know what's actually happening," Tellez added. "When we tried to call the police, because at this point that was our only resource, they literally just told us to hang on tight."

Virginia State Police told the Times that no serious injuries or fatalities arose among the stranded motorists, who were freed by Tuesday evening local time. The storm overall has produced at least five reported deaths.

The storm was termed a nor'easter, a type of storm present in the northeastern United States with attributes such as "precipitation in the form of heavy rain or snow, as well as winds of gale force, rough seas, and, occasionally, coastal flooding," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service says on its website.

The fierce storms arise when the polar jet stream collides with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico. "This difference in temperature between the warm air over the water and cold Arctic air over the land is the fuel that feeds nor'easters," NOAA's website adds.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

A "bomb cyclone" in the Pacific is dumping extreme rain and several feet of snow on California. The wild weather follows a summer of extreme drought and wildfires, and it could bring flooding, mudslides and debris flow to the parched and wildfire-scarred Golden State.

The term "bomb cyclone" refers to the rapid intensification process — "bombogenesis" — that forms it. Such storms occur when pressure in the central region of the storm descend by at least 24 millibars (an atmospheric pressure measurement) in 24 hours, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

The bomb cyclone has merged with a Category 5 "atmospheric river" — giant flowing trains of moist air in the sky. Atmospheric rivers, like hurricanes and tornadoes, are rated based on their potential for damage; a Category 5 is the strongest, or "most hazardous," bringing the chance for gusty winds, flooding, debris flow and mudslides, according to the California Department of Water Resources.

The National Weather Service (NWS) in Sacramento issued numerous warnings on Sunday (Oct. 24) concerning extreme rainfall, flooding and debris flows. In some regions, rainfall may reach into the double digits in inches.

"Lots of rain on the radar this morning," the NWS stated on Twitter just before 7 a.m. PDT (10 a.m. EDT or 1400 GMT). "That won't be changing, heavy rain and strong winds are expected for today. Debris flows possible on recent burn scars and roadway flooding will be likely."

Flash flood watches are in effect for most of Central and Northern California, The Washington Post reported. Last week, Sacramento received its first rainfall since March 19, ending a 220-day streak without a drop. Now, the region is forecast to receive more than half a foot of rain.

The Pacific Northwest and Northern California may see near-tornado or hurricane-force winds gust up to 60 mph (97 km/h), along with waves crashing on the shoreline at up to 20 feet (6 meters) high. 

The Bay Area is expected to face a deluge at least through Monday (Oct. 25); Oakland may experience record water levels in an atmospheric column (known as Precipitable WATer value or PWAT); and 5 to 8 inches (12 to 20 centimeters) of rain may fall in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. 

Regions that previously faced severe wildfire, such as those hit by the Dixie and Caldor fires, are already receiving reports of debris flows, and flash floods are possible in regions of Sacramento that had fires as long ago as 2018, according to the NWS.

It's unusual for a storm like this to happen so early in the season, according to the Washington Post. That left emergency responders little time to plan, as they were still battling the wildfires that had plagued California for much of 2021.

Those fires also raise the risk of catastrophic flooding and mudslides. That's because after a fire, soil that would normally soak up rainfall can be as water-repellant as pavement, according to NWS. As that water tumbles downhill, it can also fuel erosion and pick up ash, sand, silt, rocks and burned vegetation, according to NWS. Wildfire burns begin to heal once regrowth happens.

But "the early timing of such a major storm means that the 2021 burn scars have had very little opportunity yet for vegetation recovery," Amy East, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Cruz, wrote in an email to the Washington Post. "The Dixie Fire is still smoldering, and that area is showing only the very beginning of plant regrowth."

Originally published on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Martin Gerard Connors, Professor of Space Science and Physics, Athabasca University

Recent developments at the forefront of astronomy allow us to observe that planets orbiting other stars have weather. Indeed, we have known that other planets in our own solar system have weather, in many cases more extreme than our own.

Our lives are affected by short-term atmospheric variations of weather on Earth, and we fear that longer-term climate change will also have a large impact. The recently coined term "space weather" refers to effects that arise in space but affect Earth and regions around it. More subtle than meteorological weather, space weather usually acts on technological systems, and has potential impacts that range from communication disruption to power grid failures.

Read more: Solar weather has real, material effects on Earth

An ability to predict space weather is an essential tool in providing warnings so that mitigation can be attempted, and to hopefully, in extreme cases, forestall a disaster.

The history of weather forecasting

We are now used to large-scale meteorological forecasts that are quite accurate for about a two-week timescale.

Scientific weather forecasting originated about a century ago, with the term "front" being associated with the First World War. Meteorological prediction is based on a good knowledge of underlying theory, codified into massive computer programs running on the most advanced computers, with huge amounts of input data.

Important aspects of weather, like moisture content, can be measured by satellites that monitor continuously. Other measurements are also be readily taken, for example, by the nearly 2,000 weather balloons launched each day. Exploring the limits in weather forecasting gave rise to chaos theory, sometimes called the "butterfly effect." The buildup of error brings about the two-week practical limit.

In contrast, the prediction of space weather is only truly reliable about one hour in advance!

Solar effects

Most space weather originates from the sun. Its outermost atmosphere blows into space at supersonic speeds, although at such low density that interplanetary space is more rarified than what is considered a vacuum in our laboratories. Unlike winds on Earth, this solar wind carries along a magnetic field. This is much smaller than Earth's own field that we can detect with a compass at the surface, and vastly smaller than that near a fridge magnet, but it can interact with Earth, with an important role in space weather.

The very thin solar wind, with a very weak magnetic field, can nevertheless affect Earth in part because it interacts with a large magnetic bubble around Earth, called the magnetosphere, over a very large area, at least a hundred times as big as the surface of our planet. Much like a breeze that can barely move a thread can move a huge sailing ship when caught on the large sails, the effect of solar wind, through its direct pressure (like on a sail) or through its magnetic field interacting with Earth’s, can be enormous.

As the origin point, the sun itself is a seething mass of hot gas and magnetic fields, and their interaction is complex, sometimes even explosive. Magnetic fields are concentrated near sunspots, and produce electromagnetic phenomena like solar flares (the name says it all) and coronal mass ejections. Much as with tornadoes on Earth, we know generally when conditions are favorable for these localized explosions, but precise prediction is difficult.

Even once an event is detected, if a large mass of fast, hot and dense gas is shot in our direction (and such a "cloud" in turn is difficult to detect, coming at us against the glare of the sun), there is a further complicating factor in predicting its danger.

Detecting magnetic fields

Unlike the detectable, sometimes even visible, water content in the atmosphere that is so important in meteorology, the magnetic field of gas ejected from the sun, including in hot and denser clouds from explosions, is almost impossible to detect from afar. The effect of an interplanetary cloud is greatly enhanced if the direction of its magnetic field is opposite to Earth's own field where it hits the barrier of Earth's magnetosphere. In that case, a process known as "reconnection" allows much of the cloud's energy to be transferred to the region near Earth, and accumulate largely on the night side, despite the cloud hitting on the side facing the sun.

By secondary processes, usually involving further reconnection, this energy produces space weather effects. Earth's radiation belts can be greatly energized, endangering astronauts and even satellites. These processes can also produce bright auroras, whose beauty hides danger since they in turn produce magnetic fields. A generator effect takes place when dancing auroras make magnetic fields vary, but unlike in the generators that produce much of our electricity, the electric fields from auroras are uncontrolled.

The electric fields from auroras are small, and undetectable to human senses. However, over a very large region they can build up to apply a considerable voltage. It’s this effect that poses a hazard to our largest infrastructure, such as electric grids. To predict when this might happen, we would need to measure from afar the size and direction of magnetic field in an incoming space cloud. However, that invisible field is stealthy and hard to detect until it is nearly upon us.

Satellite monitors

By the gravitational laws of orbits, a satellite continuously monitoring magnetic fields by direct measurement must sit about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, between us and the sun a hundred times further away. A magnetic cloud causing minor space weather effects usually takes about three days to come from the sun to Earth. A truly dangerous cloud, from a bigger solar explosion, may take as little as a day. Since our monitoring satellites are relatively close to Earth, we only know about the crucial magnetic field direction at most one hour in advance of impact. This is not much time to prepare vulnerable infrastructure, like power and communication networks and satellites, to best survive.

Since the fleets of satellites needed to give better warning are not even on the drawing boards, we must rely on luck in the face of space weather. It may be a small comfort that the coming solar maximum — when the surface of the sun is at its most active during a cycle and is expected to peak in 2025 — is predicted to be mild.

It may be Mark Twain who said “it is hard to make predictions, especially about the future,” but it is certainly true in the case of space weather.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The "Last Ice Area," an Arctic region known for its thick ice cover, may be more vulnerable to climate change than scientists suspected, a new study has found. 

This frozen zone, which lies to the north of Greenland, earned its dramatic name because even though its ice grows and shrinks seasonally, much of the sea ice here was thought to be thick enough to persist through summer's warmth.

But during the summer of 2020, the Wandel Sea in the eastern part of the Last Ice Area lost 50% of its overlying ice, bringing coverage there to its lowest since record-keeping began. In the new study, researchers found that weather conditions were driving the decline, but climate change made that possible by gradually thinning the area's long-standing ice year after year. This hints that global warming may threaten the region more than prior climate models suggested. 

Related: Images of melt: Earth's vanishing ice

As climate change melts other regions of the Arctic, that could spell trouble for the animals that depend on sea ice for breeding, hunting and foraging, as the Last Ice Area "has been considered to be a refuge for ice-dependent species in a future ice-free summer Arctic," said study co-author Kristin Laidre, a principal researcher at the Polar Science Center and an assistant professor in the University of Washington's (UW) School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. 

"If, as the paper shows, the area is changing faster than expected, it may not be the refuge we have been depending on," Laidre told Live Science in an email.

The Last Ice Area spans more than 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers), reaching from Greenland's northern coast to the western part of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. There, sea ice is typically at least 5 years old, measuring about 13 feet (4 meters) thick.

In recent decades, ocean currents have bolstered ice cover in the Last Ice Area with chunks of floating sea ice. But researchers discovered that in 2020, northward winds transported ice away from Greenland and created stretches of open water that were warmed by the sun. The heated water then circulated under sea ice to drive even more melting, said lead study author Axel Schweiger, chair of UW's Polar Science Center.

Polar scientists first suspected something might be amiss in the Last Ice Area in 2018, when a stretch of ice-ringed open water, known as a polynya, appeared in February, Schweiger told Live Science in an email. Then in 2020, Schweiger and his colleagues noticed another sea ice anomaly in the Wandel Sea while gathering data for an Arctic research expedition called The Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC), which ran from September 2019 to October 2020. 

As the scientists were developing a forecast for where the research vessel might drift, they noticed that the ship was taking "a strange-looking route" through areas that normally were covered in thick ice. "We started wondering what was happening and why, and whether it was potentially connected to what we saw in the 2018 event," Schweiger said. 

On thin ice

Satellite observations and climate models revealed that in 2020, unusual northward-moving winds broke up sea ice and pushed it away from the Wandel Sea. In fact, 2020's record-low sea-ice cover would have been lower still if it hadn't been for the thick ice that drifted into the area during that year's winter months, Schweiger said. 

These losses wouldn't have been possible if climate change hadn't already been chipping away at the Last Ice Area. Approximately 20% of the 2020 ice loss could be directly attributed to climate change, while 80% was linked to the wind and ocean-current anomalies, the researchers wrote. 

The lowest extents of Arctic ice cover have all taken place within the past 15 years, and climate projections suggest that summer sea ice everywhere in the Arctic except the Last Ice Area could vanish completely as soon as 2040. Last year, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) found that Arctic sea-ice minimum hit its second-lowest point of all time (after 2012), Live Science reported in Oct. 2020.  And though the new study investigated only the Wandel Sea, the data hints that summer sea ice in the entire Last Ice Area may be at risk as well, the scientists said. 

Ice loss is already affecting the Arctic animals that rely on it for survival, such as polar bears, ringed seals and bearded seals, "and sometimes narwhals and bowhead whales," Laidre told Live Science.

While the new study doesn't say if or when the Last Ice Area could melt completely, the trend of accelerated melt is expected to continue, Schweiger said. 

"Given our results, we expect to see large patches of open water in this area more often," he said. As to how that might affect marine wildlife, that too is difficult to predict, Laidre said.

The findings were published on July 1 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

Originally published on Live Science.