This Week’s Science Blog: Look Up
(Hey look, it’s one of them TWSB posts! It’s been awhile, huh?)
So anybody who knows me knows I like clouds and cloud classifications, right? Well, so does (as expected) the World Meteorological Association (WMO). In fact, they published the first edition of the International Cloud Atlas in 1896 and have been updating it ever since.
Well, actually, the last update—meaning the last new cloud type added—was way back in 1951 (it was the cirrus intortus, meaning “an entangled lock of hair”).
However, thanks to people who really like to look up at the sky and try to classify all the clouds in it, there might be a new addition in the 2015 edition of the Atlas. The call for the possible new cloud type, the undulatus asperatus (“turbulent undulation”), arose in 2009 from Gavin Pretor-Pinney, a cloud enthusiast and founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society (I HAVE HIS CLOUD BOOK). He was editing selections of cloud photos for the Society’s gallery when he saw several of this new type of cloud which he believed did not fit into any other variety.
To gain further support for the new cloud type, Pretor-Penney worked with Graeme Anderson, a graduate student at the University of Reading, who wrote his dissertation on the undulates asperatus. In addition, many other cloud enthusiasts have continued to document cases of this type of cloud around the world with hopes that the WMO will officially add it in 2015.
Clouds, man.
This Week’s Science Blog: Atmospheric Emotional Breakdown
So apparently the thermosphere just made a record collapse and is now on the rebound.
Wait, what?
The thermosphere, as you probably all know, is one of earth’s most outer atmospheric layers and lies between the mesosphere and the exosphere (for a bit more concrete perspective: the International Space Station orbits within the thermosphere). The layer helps protect the earth’s surface from ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
Contractions and expansions of the thermosphere are not unheard of; in fact, the layer goes through an expansion/contraction pattern that generally follows the 11-year solar cycle—maximum solar activity = warming and expansion, lower solar activity = cooling and contraction. However, scientists have recorded the recent contraction as being the biggest one in 43 years.
Why? Many say it’s because the sun right now isn’t doing much (gearing up for those mega solar flares that we’re due to experience in 2011 and 2012, no doubt), but some suggest that the size of the collapse is too big to be caused by solar inactivity alone and can be at least partially explained by an elevated level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. However, even mega levels of CO2 are unable to explain the thermosphere’s dramatic shrinking, according to models.
So who knows what’s going on. It’s probably the next step in “we’ve screwed up our planet past any reasonable point of saving it.”
Today’s song: Paris (Ooh La La) by Grace Potter & The Nocturnals
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