NASA Snaps Mysterious "Night-Shining" Clouds

coondoggie writes to tell us that NASA has captured some pretty impressive images of the Alluring noctilucent (or "night-shining") clouds. These clouds are made up of ice crystals and dust and are formed at high altitudes near the poles. "Very little is known about how these clouds form over the poles, why they are being seen more frequently and at lower latitudes than ever before, or why they have been growing brighter. AIM will observe two complete cloud seasons over both poles, documenting an entire life cycle of the shiny clouds for the first time. 'It is clear that these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing and we do not understand how, why or what it means,' stated AIM principal investigator James Russell III of Hampton University, Hampton, Va. 'These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed.'"

Comments

Visible in Ohio.

[mpathetiq]

I've seen these a few times over the last years. The examples I saw weren't as brilliant as the ones in the summary (more along the lines of http://www.spaceweather.com/nlcs/gallery2007_page1.htm), but they are still very beautiful. I never realized they were a special subset of clouds.

Re:Best quote ever!

[moosesocks]

Precisely.

Atmospheric Science heavily relies upon taking what little data we *do* know, and extrapolating as much useful information as we possibly can out of it.

And it actually works pretty well... "anomalies" that have turned up in forecast models very often turn out to actually exist in reality. It was this way that we determined that a considerable amount of ash and pollution produced by industrial activity in Asia gets blown all the way to North America. It was so counterintuitive that nobody had ever thought to test for it before the forecast model suggested that it was happening quite readily.

If you also want to see something really scary, read up on the CFC Ozone depleting reaction. If it weren't for a few seasonal processes that restore the Ozone, and more importantly, wash out the CFCs, we'd have burned off our entire atmosphere in just a few years.