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stedenko
Stranger

Registered: 10/13/08
Posts: 756
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Told you so...(noctilucent clouds)
#10784394 - 08/02/09 08:12 AM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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My favorite "comspiracy" theory is making waves in academia, just like I already said.
wired link
Wired Science News for Your Neurons Mysterious, Glowing Clouds Appear Across America’s Night Skies
* By Alexis Madrigal Email Author * July 16, 2009 | * 1:00 pm | * Categories: Earth Science, Space *
mike-hollingshead11
Mysterious, glowing clouds previously seen almost exclusively in Earth’s polar regions have appeared in the skies over the United States and Europe over the past several days.
Photographers and other sky watchers in Omaha, Paris, Seattle, and other locations have run outside to capture images of what scientists call noctilucent (”night shining”) clouds. Formed by ice literally at the boundary where the earth’s atmosphere meets space 50 miles up, they shine because they are so high that they remain lit by the sun even after our star is below the horizon.
The clouds might be beautiful, but they could portend global changes caused by global warming. Noctilucent clouds are a fundamentally new phenomenon in the temperate mid-latitude sky, and it’s not clear why they’ve migrated down from the poles. Or why, over the last 25 years, more of them are appearing in the polar regions, too, and shining more brightly.
“That’s a real concern and question,” said James Russell, an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University and the principal investigator of an ongoing NASA satellite mission to study the clouds. “Why are they getting more numerous? Why are they getting brighter? Why are they appearing at lower latitudes?”
Nobody knows for sure, but most of the answers seem to point to human-caused global atmospheric change.
eiffel-tower
Noctilucent clouds were first observed in 1885 by an amateur astronomer. No observations of anything resembling noctilucent clouds before that time has ever been found. There is no lack of observations of other phenomena in the sky, so atmospheric scientists are fairly sure that the phenomenon is recent, although they are not sure why.
Over the last 125 years, scientists have learned how the clouds form. At temperatures around minus 230 degrees Fahrenheit, dust blowing up from below or falling into the atmosphere from space provides a resting spot for water vapor to condense and freeze. Right now, during the northern hemisphere’s summer, the atmosphere is heating up and expanding. At the outside edge of the atmosphere, that actually means that it’s getting colder because it’s pushed farther out into space.
It’s not hard to see how a warming Earth could change those dynamics: as the globe heats up, the top of the atmosphere should get colder.
“The prevailing theory and most plausible explanation is that CO2 buildup, at 50 miles above the surface, would cause the temperature decrease,” Russell said. He cautioned, however, that temperature observations remain inconclusive.
The global changes that appear to be reshaping noctilucent cloud distribution could be much more complex, said Vincent Wickwar, an atmospheric scientist at Utah State University whose team was first to report a mid-latitude noctilucent cloud in 2002. Temperature does not explain their observations from around 42 degrees latitude.
“To get the noctilucent clouds you need temperatures that are about 20 degrees Kelvin colder than what we see on average up there,” Wickwar said. “We may have effects from CO2 or methane but it would only be a degree or a fraction of a degree.”
Instead, Wickwar’s explanation is that a vertical atmospheric wave discovered in their LIDAR data lowered the temperature in the region above their radar installation near Logan, Utah. But then you have to ask, he noted, “Where’d the wave come from?”
They don’t really have an answer yet. Other facilities around the world with similar LIDAR capacity haven’t reported similar waves. And the Rocky Mountains, near Wickwar’s lab, can cause atmospheric waves, which could be a special feature of his location.
russell-seaice
Other hypotheses abound to explain the observed changes in the clouds. Human-caused increases in atmospheric methane, which oxidizes into carbon dioxide and water vapor, could be providing more water for ice in the stratosphere. Increases in the amount of cosmic or terrestrial dust in the stratosphere could also increase the number of brightly shining clouds.
Two years into Russell’s NASA project, more questions exist than firm answers. They will have at least three and a half more years, though, to gather good data on upper atmospheric dynamics.
The recent observations of noctilucent clouds at all kinds of latitudes provide an extra impetus to understand what is going on up there. Changes are occurring faster than scientists can understand their causes.
“I suspect, as many of us feel, that it is global change, but I fear we don’t understand it,” Wickwar said. “It’s not as simple as a temperature change.”
<<<<<<Followed shortly after bt the "Official" explanation, now keep in mind these stories are 2 weeks apart, global weather phenomena, explained in 2 weeks? You think they could do better figuring out "climate change" if they came up with this in two weeks>>>>>
Night-shining clouds created after space shuttle launches may offer clues into the cause of the Tunguska event, a mysterious blast which rocked southern Siberia more than a century ago.
Thin clouds have appeared at abnormally high altitudes over polar regions following space shuttle launches on several occasions in the past decade. These noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds typically occur in summer and lie at altitudes of about 85 kilometers, in a layer of the atmosphere called the thermosphere, says Michael C. Kelley, an atmospheric physicist at Cornell University. Kelley and his colleagues suggest in the July 28 Geophysical Research Letters that data gleaned from analyses of these high-flying clouds, as well as knowledge about the speed at which shuttle exhaust wafted to polar regions, now hint that the Tunguska blast of June 1908 (SN: 6/21/08, p. 5) resulted from a comet slamming into Earth’s atmosphere.
Each launch of a space shuttle, which burns a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as fuel, pumps about 300 metric tons of water vapor into the atmosphere at altitudes between 100 and 115 kilometers. Soon after the January 16, 2003, launch of the shuttle Columbia, a liftoff that took place just after the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, noctilucent clouds appeared over Antarctica. Similarly, a widespread display of the night-shining clouds showed up over Alaska two days after the shuttle Endeavour blasted off on August 8, 2007. Previous studies show that in both instances those clouds included material from the shuttle plumes.
“Conventional wisdom says that the plumes shouldn’t reach the poles that quickly, but they do,” Kelley notes. So sustained high-altitude winds must be carrying the plumes to the poles. Michael S. Stevens, a research physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., agrees: Experiments show that “winds can be strong at these altitudes, but they’re not well understood.”
Using data based on shuttle plume movement, the researchers suggest that the Tunguska blast could have been responsible for unusually bright noctilucent clouds over Europe soon thereafter. The likely composition of those clouds further suggests that a comet caused the blast.
Some of the thickest and brightest noctilucent clouds ever observed — ones that cast enough light to read a newspaper in the middle of the night — appeared over Europe on July 1, 1908, Kelley says. Not coincidentally, he and his colleagues argue, the Tunguska blast occurred over southern Siberia about 22 hours earlier. The team’s models suggest that winds and diffusion could have transported material from the site of the blast to the skies over London, a distance of about 5,000 kilometers, in little more than a day.
Scientists at the time suggested that the night-shining clouds over London were made of meteoritic dust. But those aerosols are typically too small to reflect sunlight efficiently, Kelley argues, suggesting the clouds above Europe were made of ice crystals. This assumption, along with the new analysis of shuttle plume movement, strongly suggests that the object that blazed into the atmosphere and disintegrated above Siberia was a moisture-rich comet rather than a relatively dry asteroid.
“That’s an interesting idea, and worth considering,” Stevens says. In an alternate scenario, he notes, rather than the moisture being transported to Europe and then coalescing into clouds, the clouds may have formed over Siberia and then been transported to the west.
<<<see, its only shuttle "smoke" totqally believable, even though its flown for 20 years, and this phenom has just recently been noticed. Believe what you want, most will deny, the sky is changing
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Baby_Hitler
Errorist




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Re: Told you so...(noctilucent clouds) [Re: stedenko]
#10784524 - 08/02/09 08:57 AM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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I blame HARP.
-------------------- Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ (•_•) <) )~ ANTIFA / \ \(•_•) ( (> SUPER / \ (•_•) <) )> SOLDIERS / \
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Taco Chef
I found dead John Cheever



Registered: 03/03/06
Posts: 33,222
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Re: Told you so...(noctilucent clouds) [Re: Baby_Hitler]
#10784627 - 08/02/09 09:27 AM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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yeah HARP really is crappy beer.
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Prisoner#1
Even Dumber ThanAdvertized!


Registered: 01/22/03
Posts: 193,665
Loc: Pvt. Pubfag NutSuck
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Re: Told you so...(noctilucent clouds) [Re: stedenko]
#10784645 - 08/02/09 09:33 AM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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so they're formed by ice but this is supposed to support global warming
IT'S FUCKING SUMMER TIME AND THERE'S ICE CLOUDS IN THE AIR, HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS SUPPORT GLOBAL WARMING AGAIN???
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Taco Chef
I found dead John Cheever



Registered: 03/03/06
Posts: 33,222
Loc: the city of dis
Last seen: 3 years, 7 months
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Re: Told you so...(noctilucent clouds) [Re: Prisoner#1]
#10784678 - 08/02/09 09:42 AM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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because harp is a terrible beer.
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Prisoner#1
Even Dumber ThanAdvertized!


Registered: 01/22/03
Posts: 193,665
Loc: Pvt. Pubfag NutSuck
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Re: Told you so...(noctilucent clouds) [Re: Taco Chef]
#10784753 - 08/02/09 09:59 AM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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it does form ice crystals when left in the freezer too long
I believe we've found the connection
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koppie
astral projectile


Registered: 07/23/04
Posts: 2,653
Loc: cloud hidden
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Re: Told you so...(noctilucent clouds) [Re: Prisoner#1]
#10784791 - 08/02/09 10:09 AM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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Quote:
Prisoner#1 said: so they're formed by ice but this is supposed to support global warming
IT'S FUCKING SUMMER TIME AND THERE'S ICE CLOUDS IN THE AIR, HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS SUPPORT GLOBAL WARMING AGAIN???
Because it always was nice and warm in the upper stratosphere. As Joe Kittiger used to say: "boy we never had ice up in the stratosphere way back in the sixties, I mean when I jumped out of my balloon from the edge of space, I did it in the buff. Only around 30000 feet did it get a bit chilly and I had to put on the sweater my grandma knitted me. I only put on pants around the time "Little Joe" became visible to the mormons on the ground."
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NobodyCares
Whatever and ever, amen



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Re: Told you so...(noctilucent clouds) [Re: stedenko]
#10784892 - 08/02/09 10:29 AM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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This undoubtedly portends the apocalypse. God help us all.
-------------------- The story goes, or the way that I was told There was a king that always felt too high and then he fell too low And so he called all the wise men to the hall And begged them for a gift to end the rises and the falls But here’s the thing, they came back with a ring It was simple and was plainly unbefitting of a king Engraved in black, it had no front or back But there were words around the band that said Just know: This Too Shall Pass
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Viveka
refutation bias


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Re: Told you so...(noctilucent clouds) [Re: Baby_Hitler]
#10788500 - 08/02/09 09:05 PM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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HARP is awful beer.
And they're using it to heat up the ionosphere with gov't money. Yet, a carbon tax is the solution to all our latest fad problems.
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upinthetrees
.Ease through your Mind.



Registered: 09/30/08
Posts: 2,663
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Re: Told you so...(noctilucent clouds) [Re: Prisoner#1]
#10788884 - 08/02/09 10:08 PM (14 years, 6 months ago) |
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Quote:
Prisoner#1 said: so they're formed by ice but this is supposed to support global warming
IT'S FUCKING SUMMER TIME AND THERE'S ICE CLOUDS IN THE AIR, HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS SUPPORT GLOBAL WARMING AGAIN???
just so that we can see, TWICE, how fucking retarded these people are. I'm sure someone from fox news secretly wrote this article.
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I want to show you life for what it's worth, from beginning to end from when your life was first launched 'till when it descends back to earth. From pyramiding at it's peak 'till when it turns back into dirt..
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