NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick photographed red sprites in Earth's upper atmosphere from the International Space Station on June 3, 2024. The bright red flashes are a less understood phenomena associated with powerful lightning ...
Planetary Sciences
1 hour ago
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Aerosols, often emitted alongside greenhouse gases, can brighten clouds and cause significant cooling. However, the uncertainty associated with aerosol–cloud interactions (ACIs) is large and potentially significant enough ...
Environment
Jul 9, 2024
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NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick captured this image of Hurricane Beryl in the Caribbean on July 1, 2024, while aboard the International Space Station, and posted it to X. The Category 4 hurricane had winds of about 130 mph ...
Earth Sciences
Jul 2, 2024
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143
The cosmos seems to come alive with a crackling explosion of pyrotechnics in this new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Taken with Webb's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), this fiery hourglass marks the scene of ...
Astronomy
Jul 2, 2024
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141
The gravitational wave detectors LIGO and Virgo have detected a population of massive black holes whose origin is one of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy. According to one hypothesis, these objects may have formed ...
Astronomy
Jun 24, 2024
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In a warming climate, cloud patterns are changing in ways that amplify global warming. A team of researchers led by Professor Johannes Quaas from Leipzig University and Hao Luo and Professor Yong Han from Sun Yat-sen University ...
Environment
Jun 20, 2024
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1453
A multi-institutional team of planetary scientists has learned more about the early composition of the solar system by studying a meteorite named Northwest Africa 14250. In their study, published in the journal Science Advances, ...
A key to improving climate prediction is to improve understanding of the impact of aerosol on clouds, commonly known as the aerosol-cloud-interaction, according to a new study led by Earth System Science Interdisciplinary ...
Earth Sciences
Jun 12, 2024
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Michigan State University researchers have made groundbreaking discoveries about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. These findings, based on data from NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope, were presented ...
Astronomy
Jun 11, 2024
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Climate skeptics are scapegoating a weather modification technique known as cloud seeding to deny the role of global warming in historic floods that have recently devastated countries from Brazil to Kenya.
Environment
Jun 11, 2024
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A cloud is a visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body. A cloud is also a visible mass attracted by gravity, such as masses of material in space called interstellar clouds and nebulae. Clouds are studied in the nephology or cloud physics branch of meteorology.
On Earth the condensing substance is typically water vapor, which forms small droplets or ice crystals, typically 0.01 mm in diameter. When surrounded by billions of other droplets or crystals they become visible as clouds. Dense deep clouds exhibit a high reflectance (70% to 95%) throughout the visible range of wavelengths. They thus appear white, at least from the top. Cloud droplets tend to scatter light efficiently, so that the intensity of the solar radiation decreases with depth into the gases, hence the gray or even sometimes dark appearance at the base. Thin clouds may appear to have acquired the color of their environment or background and clouds illuminated by non-white light, such as during sunrise or sunset, may appear colored accordingly. In the near-infrared range, clouds look darker because the water that constitutes the cloud droplets strongly absorbs solar radiation at those wavelengths.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
