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