First Data on Ball Lightning

While recording a thunderstorm in China, a team of researchers captured a ball lightning event on their instruments for the first time with spectrographic readings indicating the composition of the lightning the same as that of the soil, speculating the origin of ball lightning to be a combination of vaporization of silicon oxide and the resulting shockwave of the strike.

Bacteria in Storm Clouds

Researchers have found bacteria on hailstones that ordinarily live on plants and in the soil, suggesting these bacteria present a new transient microbial ecosystem in storm clouds where they reproduce and affect cloud chemistry and may influence weather patterns as nucleation points for precipitation.

Tsunami Airglow Signature

Using a ground-based camera, researchers detected a distinct airglow signature 250 km above Earth's surface that preceded the March 11th earthquake and subsequent tsunami near Japan by about an hour, suggesting a new method for an early warning system.

Bacteria in Hailstones

A high concentration of bacteria have been discovered at the inner core of hailstones recovered after storms, suggesting that airborne microorganisms may play a part in weather events as nucleating particles for precipitation.

Ozone Hole Recovery

Twenty-two years after the Montreal Protocol banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), the first recovery in baseline springtime ozone levels has been detected, signalling the beginning of successful repair of the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic.

Thunderstorms Create Antimatter

NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope has detected unexpected positron bursts originating from lightning flashes in thunderstorms on the surface, such radiation focused into a beam by Earth's magnetic field and directed out into space.

Natural Particle Accelerators

A lightning researcher has discovered that when particularly intense discharges in thunderstorms interact with cosmic rays high in the atmosphere, the conditions are right for a natural particle accelerator as free electrons stripped from air molecules can develop into narrow yet powerful particle beams.

New Type of Lightning

Scientists have discovered a new type of volcanic lightning that accompanies eruptions, with bolts less than 1 meter long and possibly due to electrically charged silica interacting with the local atmosphere.

Shuttle Exhaust Explains Tunguska

Observations of the patterns of water vapor in the exhaust plumes of NASA's Space Shuttle have been used to explain the mysterious Tunguska event of 1908 as the impact and explosion of an icy comet in Siberia.

Particles Detected Underground Tied to Upper Atmosphere

Scientists at the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) have discovered that particles detected deep underground correlate to weather events in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

Collaborating with the US-based Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) project at Fermilab, scientists analyzed data collected from an abandoned iron-ore mine in Minnesota. They found a remarkably close correlation between subatomic particles named muons detected underground and the temperature of the stratosphere. Cosmic rays naturally decay upon entering the atmosphere, producing a muon as a daughter product. A rise in temperature means an expansion of the atmosphere, with fewer impacts destroying cosmic rays and leaving them to decay and produce muons.

Also suprising was a correlation with sudden and intermittent increases in stratosphere temperature (as much as 40°C) occurring during winter months. This weather event, known as Sudden Stratospheric Warming, has long been regarded as unpredictable but now can be identified by sudden increases in the levels of muons detected.

Climate data has previously only been available via weather balloons and satelites, but these findings open a new avenue for ground-based meteorological study.

These results were published in a recent edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

Source: ScienceDaily