Severe weather — like thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes — can push air upward into a higher layer of the atmosphere and trigger gravity waves. Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE) instrument captures these waves by looking for variations in the brightness of Earth’s airglow (above). Recently, when Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern United States, AWE caught a series of gravity waves some 55 miles up, pushed by the storm (below). It’s incredible to see these long-ranging ripples spreading far beyond the heart of the storm. (Video credits: NASA Goddard and Utah State University)
Tag: gravity waves
Clouds Down Under
This large and unusual cloud formation was captured one July morning over western Australia. Stretching over 1,000 kilometers, the clouds have interesting features at both the large and small scale. The small-scale ripples within the clouds are gravity waves triggered by the terrain below. The larger, arced features are tougher to explain, though they may also be related to gravity waves and terrain, just on a much larger scale. They also resemble fallstreak clouds where supercooled droplets evaporate from the inside of the cloud out. (Image credit: W. Liang; via NASA Earth Observatory)
Rippling Airglow
Though we rarely notice it, our sky is always aglow. Washed in solar radiation, the oxygen and nitrogen molecules at high altitude get broken apart during the daytime and recombine at night, producing a luminescent glow that forms a uniform backdrop against the sky. In this image, the airglow forms a bull’s-eye-like set of rings, thanks to atmospheric gravity waves left behind by a thunderstorm. (Image credit: J. Dai; via APOD)
