Friday - July 16, 2010

The Sky IS Falling!

Horry Clap, the atmosphere just collapsed! Well, last year anyway. Did you notice? No, neither did I. My ears didn’t even pop. But NASA noticed! And like every other kind of New that impacts Science, experts are baffled!!

NASA-funded researchers are monitoring a big event in our planet’s atmosphere. High above Earth’s surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied layer of gas called “the thermosphere” recently collapsed and now is rebounding again.

“This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” says John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19th issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). “It’s a Space Age record.”

The collapse happened during the deep solar minimum of 2008-2009—a fact which comes as little surprise to researchers. The thermosphere always cools and contracts when solar activity is low. In this case, however, the magnitude of the collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain.

“Something is going on that we do not understand,” says Emmert.

The thermosphere ranges in altitude from 90 km to 600+ km. It is a realm of meteors, auroras and satellites, which skim through the thermosphere as they circle Earth. It is also where solar radiation makes first contact with our planet. The thermosphere intercepts extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photons from the sun before they can reach the ground. When solar activity is high, solar EUV warms the thermosphere, causing it to puff up like a marshmallow held over a camp fire. (This heating can raise temperatures as high as 1400 K—hence the name thermosphere.) When solar activity is low, the opposite happens.

Lately, solar activity has been very low. In 2008 and 2009, the sun plunged into a century-class solar minimum. Sunspots were scarce, solar flares almost non-existent, and solar EUV radiation was at a low ebb. Researchers immediately turned their attention to the thermosphere to see what would happen.

Emmert uses a clever technique: Because satellites feel aerodynamic drag when they move through the thermosphere, it is possible to monitor conditions there by watching satellites decay. He analyzed the decay rates of more than 5000 satellites ranging in altitude between 200 and 600 km and ranging in time between 1967 and 2010. This provided a unique space-time sampling of thermospheric density, temperature, and pressure covering almost the entire Space Age. In this way he discovered that the thermospheric collapse of 2008-2009 was not only bigger than any previous collapse, but also bigger than the sun alone could explain.

One possible explanation is carbon dioxide (CO2).

When carbon dioxide gets into the thermosphere, it acts as a coolant, shedding heat via infrared radiation. It is widely-known that CO2 levels have been increasing in Earth’s atmosphere. Extra CO2 in the thermosphere could have magnified the cooling action of solar minimum.

“But the numbers don’t quite add up,” says Emmert. “Even when we take CO2 into account using our best understanding of how it operates as a coolant, we cannot fully explain the thermosphere’s collapse.”

According to Emmert and colleagues, low solar EUV accounts for about 30% of the collapse. Extra CO2 accounts for at least another 10%. That leaves as much as 60% unaccounted for.

So now what? Are we going to have AGC? Now it’s carbon dioxide causes atmospheric COOLING?? The boy who cried wolf, much?

Here’s a link to a NASA video that smells like bullshit to me. CO₂ catches IR rays from the earth. That causes it to get hot, and that means the molecules vibrate faster, causing them to collide with more other molecules and thus shedding the heat. But as it rises into the higher parts of the atmosphere, where there are exponentially less other molecules around, the CO₂ gets heated up by colliding with those other molecules, and then sheds the heat via plain old radiation. But dear old PV=NRT is still the law even in the thermosphere, so this cooling effect causes the thermoshere to contract. And pretty much by definition, that means it’s density has to increase. Which means more molecules in closer proximity, which means a minimization of the upper atmospheric behavior of the gas. It seems to me NASA is saying the density decreases as the layer cools. Personally, I think they are even more unwilling to stop blaming carbon for all their problems then Obama is unwilling to stop blaming Bush for all of his.

Hey, maybe they should bring sunspots into their equation. Why not? The sun continues to be at or very near the minimum point in the opening years of Solar Cycle 24, currently still below even the revised sunspot predictionsmade last year. Right now we have a grand total of ONE visible sunspot. Does that help or hurt? Who knows? I’m baffled, which implies that I am an expert!

Posted by Drew458     on 07/16/2010 at 01:43 PM   
Filed Under: • Amazing Science and Discoveries • Climate-Weather •  
• Comments (7) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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