Balloon-bourne Imaging Captures Turbulence Sources Revealed in Polar Mesospheric Clouds

Tuesday, January 28, 2020 - 10:20 in Astronomy & Space

This blog post originated in the 2018 Science Mission Directorate Science and Technology Report. PROJECT Polar Mesospheric Cloud Turbulence experiment (PMC Turbo) KEY POINTS The balloon-borne PMC Turbo experiment successfully provided information about small-scale instabilities and turbulence in the mesosphere that will ultimately contribute to improving weather and climate models. The PMC Turbo payload positioned for launch at Esrange (left); a PMC image of strong and interacting Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities that have wavelengths of ~4 km, colorized to enhance sensitivity to small features (right). The thin remote Polar Mesospheric Cloud (PMC) layer at an ~82-km altitude in the summer polar atmosphere is possibly the best place on Earth to study the sources and effects of turbulence in geophysical fluids – key small-scale processes that play major roles in weather and climate. Images from the balloon-borne PMC Turbulence experiment (PMC Turbo) are yielding insights into how gravity wave and turbulence processes transport and deposit energy and momentum throughout the...

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