Atmospheric

Volcanoes Are Climate Friends To The Tropics- Study

Big volcanic eruptions over the past 450 years have temporarily cooled weather in the tropics but suggest that such effects may have been masked in the 20th century by rising global temperatures, say researchers. The  paper, which shows that higher latitud ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 5 2009 - 5:54pm

Watch out, jerks everywhere: your time has come

I have a list of jerks already lined up for powering a space elevator, putting them in mortal danger of dying a painful death by plummeting elevator. Carefully Timed Jerks Could Power Space Elevator Disorganized jerks and procrastinating jerks need not app ...

Blog Post - Becky Jungbauer - Jan 6 2009 - 11:20pm

Get Better Weather Forecasts By Chasing... Thundersnow

Never 'heard' of thundersnow?  It's a rare sort of thunderstorm but the precipitation is snow rather than rain and because the snow dampens the sound so while you might  thunder from a typical storm miles away  the boom of thundersnow can on ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 13 2009 - 2:03pm

Better Aerosol Research Would Lead To More Accurate Climate Models- NASA

Climate prediction is difficult stuff.   As you know, it's impossible to predict the weather 10 days from now much less six months and aside from "it will get a lot worse" no one can say with any degree of certainty what Earth's climate ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 17 2009 - 11:23am

What Cosmic Rays Deep Underground Can Tell Us About The Weather

Cosmic-rays detected half a mile underground in a disused U.S. iron-mine can be used to detect major weather events occurring 20 miles up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters and led by scienti ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 21 2009 - 10:54am

MINOS, Neutrinos And Iron Mines

Half a mile underground is probably the last place you might expect to be able to observe atmospheric phenomena. If you knew about the MINOS experiment, however, you might think otherwise. MINOS, which stands for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, ...

Article - Chris Rollins - Jan 23 2009 - 2:21am

Where Does The CO2 Go? The Mystery Of The Missing Sinks

Picture a tree in the forest. The tree "inhales" carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, transforming that greenhouse gas into the building materials and energy it needs to grow its branches and leaves.  By removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 2 2009 - 1:06pm

Aerosols More Damaging To Atmosphere Than Typically Considered

Aerosols are fine particles suspended in the atmosphere. Sources of human-generated aerosols include industry, motor vehicles and vegetation burning. Natural sources include volcanoes, dust storms and ocean plankton. Human-generated aerosols have long been ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 15 2009 - 10:37am

At-Risk Forests Account For 20 Percent Of CO2 Emissions Absorption

Globally, tropical trees in undisturbed forest are absorbing nearly a fifth of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels, according to a 40-year study of African tropical forests published in Nature. The researchers says that remaining tropical forests remo ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 18 2009 - 2:51pm

2008 Cool Off- A US Blip Or An End To Global Warming? James Hansen Has Some Answers

The ten warmest years on record have all occurred between 1997 and 2008 but the 2008 temperature in the US was not much different than the 1951-1980 mean, which makes it cooler than all the previous years this decade, say climatologists at the NASA Goddard ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 23 2009 - 7:29pm