Climate discrepancy solved
Previously is was thought that the result might have been due to some inadequacy in the data for the troposphere. However, Dian Gaffen from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and c...
New light on ball lightning
Ball lightning has only been seen during thunderstorms. The average ball lightning appears as a sphere about 30 cm across and lasts for about 10 seconds. The earliest reports of ball lightning date ba...
Mountain waves seen from space
Eckermann and Preusse analysed data from the cryogenic infrared spectrometer and telescope for the atmosphere (CRISTA), which was flown on the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1994. They discovered that the ...
Good news for the planet
Global warming – sometimes called the greenhouse effect – is caused by gases in the atmosphere that absorb and then re-emit infrared radiation, thereby ‘trapping’ the heat on t...
Has man caused climate change?
The Earth’s average global temperature has increased by 0.6 Kelvin in the past 100 years. There are believed to be four main processes that can effect the Earth’s climate. Two of these, sm...
Ozone mystery is solved
In theory, the creation of ozone – caused by the breakdown of oxygen in the atmosphere by ultraviolet light – is a mass-independent process. However, experiments by Klaus Mauersberger and ...
Humans are the cause of climate change
The team looked in particular for ‘lag time’ effects in the data. For example, the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 lowered the global temperature by 0.3 C in the followi...
CERN plans global-warming experiment
Experimentalists at CERN will use a cloud chamber to mimic the Earth’s atmosphere in order to try and determine whether cloud formation is influenced by solar activity. According to the Danish t...
Wet weather on Titan
Planetary physicists hope to use atmospheric data from Titan to provide clues to the behaviour of our own atmosphere. The difficulty with studying Earth’s atmosphere is that it is affected by ex...
