A new explanation for Jupiter's shrinking Great Red Spot
Jupiter's Great Red Spot—the biggest windstorm in the solar system—is shrinking, and a new study may help explain why.
Jupiter's Great Red Spot—the biggest windstorm in the solar system—is shrinking, and a new study may help explain why.
Planetary Sciences
Jul 18, 2024
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A small area of the southwestern Pacific Ocean, near New Zealand and Australia, can trigger temperature changes that affect the entire Southern Hemisphere, a new study has found.
Earth Sciences
Jul 22, 2024
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In a warehouse in the lush humid farmlands of central Thailand, thousands of pythons lie coiled in containers, rearing and striking at the glass as people pass by.
Agriculture
Jul 17, 2024
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A team of Brazilian scientists has discovered a fossilized skeleton of what they believe is one of the world's oldest dinosaurs after heavy rains in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul accelerated the natural process ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jul 17, 2024
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160
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of Saturn and its colossal rings on July 4, 2020, during summer in the gas giant's northern hemisphere. Two of Saturn's icy moons are also clearly visible: Mimas at right, ...
Astronomy
Jul 25, 2024
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52
Crave that cup of coffee in the morning? Globally, consumers drink more than 2.2 billion cups daily. Someone grows all that joe: More than 100 million farmers worldwide produce coffee.
Plants & Animals
Jul 25, 2024
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For decades, scientists warned that continued burning of oil, gas, and coal would have devastating climate impacts. Those impacts are being felt around the world.
Environment
Jul 19, 2024
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Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have finally confirmed what models have previously predicted: An exoplanet has differences between its eternal morning and eternal evening atmosphere. WASP-39 b, a giant planet ...
Astronomy
Jul 15, 2024
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Being able to create accurate weather models for weather forecasting is essential for every aspect of the American economy, from aviation to shipping. To date, weather models have been primarily based on equations related ...
Environment
Jul 9, 2024
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How do we measure chaos and why would we want to? Together, Penn engineers Dani S. Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor in Bioengineering and in Electrical and Systems Engineering, and postdoctoral researcher Kieran Murphy ...
General Physics
Jul 30, 2024
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Weather is a set of all the phenomena occurring in a given atmosphere at a given time. Weather phenomena lie in the troposphere. Weather refers, generally, to day-to-day temperature and precipitation activity, whereas climate is the term for the average atmospheric conditions over longer periods of time. When used without qualification, "weather" is understood to be the weather of Earth.
Weather occurs due to density (temperature and moisture) differences between one place and another. These differences can occur due to the sun angle at any particular spot, which varies by latitude from the tropics. The strong temperature contrast between polar and tropical air gives rise to the jet stream. Weather systems in the mid-latitudes, such as extratropical cyclones, are caused by instabilities of the jet stream flow. Because the Earth's axis is tilted relative to its orbital plane, sunlight is incident at different angles at different times of the year. On Earth's surface, temperatures usually range ±40 °C (100 °F to −40 °F) annually. Over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, changes in Earth's orbit affect the amount and distribution of solar energy received by the Earth and influence long-term climate
Surface temperature differences in turn cause pressure differences. Higher altitudes are cooler than lower altitudes due to differences in compressional heating. Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a future time and a given location. The atmosphere is a chaotic system, so small changes to one part of the system can grow to have large effects on the system as a whole. Human attempts to control the weather have occurred throughout human history, and there is evidence that human activity such as agriculture and industry has inadvertently modified weather patterns.
Studying how the weather works on other planets has been helpful in understanding how weather works on Earth. A famous landmark in the Solar System, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, is an anticyclonic storm known to have existed for at least 300 years. However, weather is not limited to planetary bodies. A star's corona is constantly being lost to space, creating what is essentially a very thin atmosphere throughout the Solar System. The movement of mass ejected from the Sun is known as the solar wind.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA