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Noctilucent Clouds Spread and Mystify
Wired has a feature on noctilucent clouds, once seen only at high latitudes but increasingly visible now lower down the globe. The clouds result from ice crystals at altitudes of 50 miles, higher than five 9s of the atmosphere. What water ice is doing up there, in a region 100 million times drier than the Sahara desert, is only one of the mysteries associated with the clouds. They are a recent phenomenon: the first scientific description of noctilucent clouds was penned in 1885. For a time it was believed that the clouds were an effect resulting from the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano two years before. Since 2002, the clouds have been sighted — and photographed — as far south as Oregon, Colorado, and Utah. Some scientists believe that human-caused climate change is playing a role, but others doubt this. Two satellites are in orbit to study the clouds; NASA's AIM generated this day-by-day movie of clouds in the vicinity of the North Pole during 2008.
Something else to handle the load of serving the movie:
http://drop.io/noctilucent
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"What water ice is doing up there, in a region 100 million times drier than the Sahara desert"
Bloody well isn't dryer than Mars and Mars has clouds and precipitation.
Before the chemtrail conspiracists show up. Somebody break out the Orgone generators!
OH DEAR GOD! They're almost everywhere! I'm moving to Arizona... it's the only safe place left!
So stop messing around!
.... global warming.....
Lets face it, if its getting hotter and dryer down here, then the wet and cold gotta go somewhere...
Or maybe its just natures way of countering global warming..... you know like how evaporation helps cool....
We can't just reflexively blame mankind for any and all meteorological events.
Man-made "Global warming" is going to go down as one of the greatest hoaxes of our generation.
This could be the missing phenomenon behind the ice age cycle. If so, we can forget about global warming -- we're on our way to reglaciation. It had to happen sooner or later.
Kinda disappointing that the first thing nowadays when people see something new it's that "Wow, humans really stuffed up the planet" instead of "Wow, that's an interesting natural phenomenon"
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
This is merely an ice crystal delivery system, to cool down the earth, for when global warming gets too, err, global?
Or, this is one giant meth lab?
Aren't comets and asteroids sometimes supposed to be made of ice?
APOD story
...even though the global temperature record hasn't risen since 1998. When is this hoax going to end?
I blame gays.
Aren't they caused by the space shuttle? I could swear there was an article a couple weeks ago on slashdot about it. Basically they found that they tend to form hours after the shuttle launch, particularly around Antarctica. The shuttle's boosters release X tons of water into the high atmosphere, at altitudes water can't regularly attain, which gets caught by high moving winds that drive it south, where they crystallize.
Interestingly enough we just had a shuttle launch just a couple days ago.
The clouds are caused by water condensing on space dust which has suddenly increased because it's the harbinger of the huge mountain of an asteroid that's aimed at us. Send royalties to... oh, right. I'll never get to spend it, even if I saw any.
Looks more like someone causing image-based words or letters to form in our upper atmosphere.
First they told me to fear the AIDS.
Then they told be to fear the hole in the ozone.
Now I have to fear the clouds?
The striped nature of the cloud features is probably because the data was gathered by the DMSP Weather Satellites using their low light detection sensors. These do not take a full-earth view of the world as the sun-synchronous GOES satellites do. DMSP vehicles operate in a lower orbit but a high angle and circular orbit. This brings them near the poles, and they cross the equator at roughly 9AM or 3PM locally to take advantage of the sun angle and shadows on clouds. They scan a wide path beneath them in visible and infrared channels, and have been used for years to do night light intensity mapping, such as for light pollution surveys.
The stripes are the paths from the several vehicles in orbit assembled over time when they passed near the poles.
Your tax dollars at work!
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
Try my journal entry which connects noctilucent clouds to Space Shuttle launches and the Tunguska explosion.
Oh clouds show up... Climate change is the answer... Do we know? NO! But since climate change is happening it must be the reason... YEAH WHATEVER!!! This is an example of fooled by randomness. Might it be climate change? Sure, and then again it might not be. How about we get more facts...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Shoot, I've been reading this with a strange tickling of memory, and now it comes back.
Forty or more years ago, when I was a kid in west Texas, I would see clouds that glowed at night, and the explanation was light picked up from the sun which was below the horizon.
Low storm clouds.
I think this is just something no one has noticed before. Or, perhaps, no one has written an article about the phenomenae in a "scholarly journal" for several years.
"20 degrees Kelvin" - FTFA
One of the theories behind the correlation between the sunspot cycle and climate change is that the solar wind tends to deflect cosmic rays from the inner system, and that when sunspots are rare, the solar wind isn't as strong, which allows more cosmic rays to strike the upper atmosphere, generating clouds which deflect sunlight from the Earth. Since up until very recently there's been a sunspot drought, this might indicate a cause.
in north-America it's going to get a whole lot colder over the next 10 to 20 years. the new north pole (North-America). time to move away from that hell-hole!
their clever cloud-disguised warships...
When anything unusual and weather related happens, legions of idiots will say it is because of global warming.
I didn't, but that was the beyond laughing kind of funny. Thanks.
Just this afternoon I was driving my family to see the Harry Potter movie, and talk turned toward which Harry Potter characters we'd choose to be friends with. Everybody in my family agreed they'd like to be friends with Luna Lovegood. Then I dropped my bombshell: When I was a teenager, I was friends with somebody who was just like Luna.
"He believed anything he heard, as long as it was weird," I said.
"Like what?" they wanted to know.
"Oh, pyramid power, alien abductions, elves, ghosts and fairies, anything like that. No, seriously. He was really into cryptobiology. You know, Yeti, sea monsters, tribes of strange little people who live in the woods."
"You mean, like in South America?"
"No, near Boston, down toward Plymouth I think. Oh, yes, he believed in clouds."
"Clouds?"
"Oh, I mean sentient clouds. Intelligent ones. They supposedly have a civilization but they're so different from us we don't understand it. He had plans to build some electronic gizmo so he could listen to them. Or that might have been the ghosts. Probably both. Funny, I hadn't thought of him in years."
"What happened to him?"
"I lost touch with him, then I ran into him some years later. He told me he'd joined a satanist cult, but they'd messed his head up really bad."
Which was true. You could tell: he still believed anything weird he heard, but now that made him miserable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
These clouds have always been there, but no-one bothered to look at them since they don't affect rainfall. In Calgary, the nighttime sky is almost always white at night - city lights bouncing off these high altitude clouds.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I do hope their crapper is going to get fixed though...
Another video of the clouds: http://www.youtube.com/v/nqFlgXi207M
That's a nice story in Wired, but we here on Slashdot discussed this topic back in 2007.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Having never heard of this and living above 60 degrees in latitude, I have something new to look for in the dark skies of a 10 month winter. Cool.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
"Right now, during the northern hemisphere's summer, the atmosphere is heating up and expanding. At the outside edge of the atmosphere, that actually means that it's getting colder because it's pushed farther out into space."
Can someone explain to me how our atmosphere can be getting "colder" at the edges? I don't think space is getting any "colder" (at least not on a scale relevant to "global warming"). And I would imagine that while the altitude that our atmosphere may change, and the temperature gradient in that atmosphere my change, I can't see how the "outside edge of the atmosphere" can get "colder".
--
http://aim.hamptonu.edu/outreach/song/Noctilucent_Cloud.mp3
They are a recent phenomenon: the first recorded observation of a neutron star was in 1965.
Really, sometimes you just want to scream. Noctilucent clouds are inherently hard to observe. They can be seen only between 50 and 65 degrees of latitude, when the Sun is below the horizon, during summer -- and at that resemble cirrus clouds. Given that clouds in general were not classified prior to 1801, that this specific type of cloud wasn't noticed as being distinct from cirrus until 1885 doesn't tell us anything about their existence or non-existence prior to then.
It might be coincidental, but the altitude of this phenomenon is the same altitude as the outer edge of the ozone layer. The northern latitudes are also the areas where the earth's magnetic field allows some solar wind particles to a interact with our atmosphere.
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/astronomy/magnetic-field/earth.jpg
A portion of the charged particles in the solar winds are protons - aka hydrogen ions. I think it's possible, but maybe not all that likely, that the water present at these altitudes is due to the interaction between the protons in the solar winds and the oxygen in the ozone layer. While much of the oxygen present is in the form of ozone, atomized and O2 forms are produced and destroyed in the normal processes of the ozone layer. Since water is much more stable, it is possible that water molecules may accumulate simply from the interaction of solar winds and the ozone present at that altitude and latitude.
It's still WAAAY early to ask, probably...but I keep hearing about the VanAllen belts changing- the magnetic north moving faster than before.
Could it be some of the huge volume of H3 is hitting the outer atmosphere, and the heat is causing the resulting H20? (And probably some spare electrons, etc...)?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
"100 million times drier than the Sahara desert"
Thats right- its so dry just thinking about them leeches juice from your brain. Ouch!
The Real reason for these Noctilucent Clouds appearing in the mid lattitudes is because of the violent wobble of Earth due to the presence of Nibiru in the Solar system. Earth is wobbling at least twice daily now, sliding under the atmosphere. This is changing the weather patterns. Look for much more of this kind of thing and many other symptoms of Earth under great stress to come as we approach the passing of the this planet, Nibiru. Nibiru will cause a poleshift and a restructuring of the geology of the surface of Earth. Don't be near the water when this happens. I figure about summer 2010. Crow.
I am often somewhat stupefied at the fiercely stubborn refusal to at least look at factual evidence, such as glaciers melting (and yes, they truly are, worldwide, where I live here in Switzerland, but also in Alaska for example). I understand that there should be healthy scepticism at any scientific claim, but the climate is almost certainly changing, enough so that I can personally see it. When I came to Switzerland 20 years ago, the summers were not as hot or humid as they now are and winters were longer and colder. There used to be snow on the ground for around two months in January and February, and often into April, but if you have snow on the ground for more than two weeks in a row these days, it's a lot.
I originally come from South Africa and the part I come from over there, which is 1500 meters above sea level, used to have warm, pleasant summers. These days, the summers are often about 5 degrees hotter and much dryer.
All of this is just my anecdotal evidence, but I think you have to be pretty stubborn to ignore what's happening around you.
Is rain from these clouds what downed the airbus?
I think the "believers" aren't scientists at all, but politicians and paid shills disguised as scientists.
I've watched these clouds last week on the island of Juist, Germany. It was quite amazing and mysterious, something like Aurora Borealis. You do not overlook a phenomen like this. If they had been around all through history, many cultures would have believed them to be spirits or gods and worshipped them.
Trust me, I work for the government.
I declare Global Warming to be a new deity of some sort, it has all the hallmarks of an insanely stupid religion. For example, a thousand years ago:
Lightning: act of God! Let's pay priests to sacrifice our cattle.
Torrential rain: act of God! Let's sacrifice virgins.
Drought: act of God! Let's run around begging for forgiveness!
Today: Lightning: Global warming! Let's pay idiot politicians to make new carbon emission laws.
Torrential rain: Global warming! Let's make farting illegal to reduce methane.
Drought: Global warming! Let's stop cutting trees!
Maybe there's a God, and it's very likely that there is a human cause for the climate change. But regardless of what you happen to believe in, the moment you throw out logic, rationale and scientific reasoning you become nothing more than a religious zealot.
-- My 2 cents.
DDT ban myth bingo.
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Any discussion of the skies climate change without addressing the question "What are Chemtrails?" is not bringing all the evidence to the table.
Watch this documentary on the History Channel that shows how weather experimentation is occuring.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3gKa0z7rjM
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Methane trapped in/under polar ice, 3000 natural levels.
Note also it's a powerful greenhouse gas and it's expansion would produce a short term cooling period (which we were warned might be a short term effect of global climate change).
Now I imagine, this been slashdot that no one read the article... but these clouds are greated by low temperatures over the north pole.
My grandfather said we could solve the oil crisis by harvesting the natural gas deposits, I guess we're too late. He's old and mysoginist so when he says something smart my mother suggests I ignore it, but he's a scientist and it looks like he was right again.