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Surprise Discovery In Earth's Upper Atmosphere
elyons sends word out of UCLA of a completely unexpected discovery in the physics of the Sun-Earth interaction — a previously unknown basic mode of energy transfer from the solar wind to the Earth's magnetosphere. "'It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun. This discovery is like finding it got hotter when the sun went down,' said Larry Lyons, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. 'We all have thought for our entire careers — I learned it as a graduate student — that this energy transfer rate is primarily controlled by the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field. The closer to southward-pointing the magnetic field is, the stronger the energy transfer rate is, and the stronger the magnetic field is in that direction. [It turns out that] if it is both southward and big, the energy transfer rate is even bigger.'" The researchers have two papers on the discovery coming out in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Saying "It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun" when they're talking about the interaction of the solar wind and the magnetosphere is more than a little disingenuous....
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
Okay so when I first saw the title, I read it as "Surprise! Discovery In Earth's Upper Atmosphere" and thought the landing a couple of days ago was a hoax or something.
> "Heejeong separated the data into when the solar wind was fluctuating a lot and when it
> was fluctuating a little," he added. "When the interplanetary magnetic field fluctuations
> are low, she saw the pattern everyone knows,
That is, the likelihood of "substorms" in Earh's ionoshpere is a function of how "northward"
or "southward" Earth's manetosphere is. More southward, more storms, worse
satellite TV reception.
> but when she analyzed the pattern when the interplanetary magnetic field was
> fluctuating strongly, that pattern completely disappeared. Instead, the strength of the
> flows depended on the strength of the fluctuations.
There's this "interplanetary magnetic field" between the Sun and Earth. The solar wind
is Earthward charged particles from the Sun. These particles interact with the Earth's
magnetisphere. When you have large changes in the solar wind, there are more
substorms, and worse satellite TV reception.
So, pseudo-diff-eq, their contribution is the second term (or maybe I'm missing the point):
substorm likelihood =
southwardness of magnetosphere +
change of solar wind intensity with respect to time
Poor graduate student. So much data...
It's good to see some basic science being done though. More, please!
The problem many people (or at least I!) have with PARTS of the GW / global climate change conversation is that it's clear that we have at best a minimalistic understanding of climate. I don't even think most climate scientists would deny this... Like you point out--this is a great example of a really interesting (and fundamental!) discover. New discoveries in terms of carbon sequestration (or lack thereof in many cases), cloud vapour / temperature interactions, etc are being found all the time. The technology we have available to monitor global temperatures and carbon levels, arctic ice, etc, and the tools (better satellites, etc) are likewise exponentially improving.
I don't think you can find a person out there who would deny that strong scientific progress is being made.
The problem is with the non-science aspects of the movement. Heck, the problem is that it IS a movement. Things like Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and some scientists who do seem to be more interested in a political agenda more than a scientific one do not help. That is to say, of all the parts of what you call the "hoopla about GW" (nice desc!) we can really do without the hysteria and the partisan politicking (why is global warming even a partisan issue to begin with?! -- and I'm fully expecting a partisan respose ;-) )
Why is this being tagged "climate change" with people yammering about global warming? This is a previously unexpected form of energy transfer but would have been occuring since...oh...our planet had a magnetosphere and there is not a single mention in the article concerning climate change or global warming.
Larry: This discovery is like finding it got hotter when the sun went down.
Interviewer: So, the temperature actually goes up when the sun sets?
Larry: Er, no.
Interviewer: No? What does happen then?
Larry: Um, well... the temperature goes... down, I guess.
Interviewer: Okay. Thanks for that Larry.
Whales and flowerpots.
Disappointment is me.
(why is global warming even a partisan issue to begin with?! -- and I'm fully expecting a partisan respose ;-) )
Is 'both sides are filled with morons' partisan?
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Something a scientist writes might also be so steeped in jargon that it's less intelligible to anyone not familiar with that particular research field. That's why we need more people like Niel deGrasse Tyson, who can live in the academic world but also communicate very well with non-academics.
There are legitimate reasons to be unconvinced, no matter what the affiliations of the people offering them may be.
We have an hypothesis about the reaction of the earth's climate to CO2 emissions. The hypothesis is first, that the additional CO2 warms by absorbing IR radiation. That this will occur is not subject to dispute, its basic physics, and has been known for around 100 years. It was only partially known to Aarhenius, who seems to have got the effect right but to have overestimated its magnitude, but the effect itself has been known. This is a relatively minor component of the hypothesis. If this effect were all there was, doubling of CO2 levels from around 300ppm to around 600ppm would raise the average temperature of the planet in the lower troposphere by roughly 1 degree centigrade. This would not be terribly serious - in fact, it might even improve life, and its of the same order as natural variations anyway.
The second hypothesized effect is that when the climate warms by any amount, from any cause, there is positive feedback. This feedback amplifies the effect. So the warming of 1 degree caused by CO2 rises is hypothesized to lead to further warming of a further few degrees. The amounts are uncertain. The total warming effect could be anything from 2-5 degrees C. Even at the lower levels, this would lead to significant problems, and at the higher levels, particularly over 5 degrees, we would be looking at climate disaster.
However, its a question whether the climate reacts to warming by positive feedback, and if so how strongly, or by negative feedback. To have concerns about feedback is not denialism or flat-earth -ism. Its quite reasonable.
This is where we come into the evidence issue. The decisive evidence for feedback would be if the climate were now genuinely warming faster than or differently from ever before. And this is where the question of the refusal of the climate science community to reveal their data becomes important. We have Jacoby, d'Arrigo, Mann, Thompson, Jones and others refusing to reveal the data which would allow replication and verification of their results. Their defenders meanwhile abuse everyone who does not simply believe, without proof, that the results are as represented.
As long as the data and algorithms are not placed in the public domain for inspection and validation, it is going to be reasonable to be skeptical. All that the authors have to do to eliminate this skepticism is to publish. Until they do, it is going to remain an open question whether there is anything very special going on with climate in terms of the last 2,000 years, and so it will remain an open question whether feedback works the way that the IPCC hypothesizes.
And so, it will remain an open question whether the reaction of the climate machine to an initial warming of 1 degree will be an ultimate stable state of no change, +1, +2 or +5.
In the same way as when I drink a cup of coffee, you cannot predict my future temperature solely by reference to the heat content of the coffee, nor can you make any assumptions without examining the way my body reacts about whether the feedback will be positive or negative, so you need evidence in the form of the behavior of the climate to tell what sort of feedback mechanisms occur. It is very, very odd, inexplicable in fact, that the climate science community seems to see it as positively wrong to ask for the data on what is allegedly going on with the climate to be released. Free the data, free the code, and lets see if the studies prove what they purport to.
Based on purely anecdotal evidence, it seems to be getting worse: my impression is that climate scientists who entered the field after it became a partisan political issue are much more likely to have axes to grind one way or another. The 40+ y.o. PhDs entered the field because they were interested in science, but a lot of the under-40 crowd entered the field to join a battle on one side or another.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
To me, the most interesting point of this discovery is that it should improve our understanding of shortwave radio propagation.
It has always frustrated me that the same space program that is producing the data needed to understand the physics needed to make accurate, day-to-day predictions of ionospheric propagation -- a hundred-year-old mystery -- is also the same space program that replaced commercial HF communication with satellites, greatly reducing the economic value of such predictions (and, therefore, the science funding to make them). So now that we have the ability, we no longer have the desire . . . unless one is an amateur radio operator, and it's harder to think of an entity lower on the economic value chain than that.
The most difficult path for shortwave links is one that passes near the magnetic poles, like the path from Southeast Asia to the US East Coast that passes over the north magnetic pole. Energy from the solar wind couples into the Earth's magnetic field; in particular, charged particles are directed parallel to the field. This is great for propagation over most of the planet; however, near the poles the magnetic field becomes vertical and these particles are directed perpendicular to the ground, where they form a ring of radio wave attenuation and refraction in the upper atmosphere that closes this path for many days out of a given month. To open this path there has to be minimal energy coupling from the solar wind, and there is very little understanding of when this will occur. Even the best propagation prediction software (e.g., VOACAP and Proplab Pro) is based on statistics, giving one the probability of a given path being open.
This discovery should add to our understanding of how and when these paths will open. Until then, we have to survive on "Space Weather" web sites like these, and turn on a radio to see for ourselves what the day brings.
(Those interested in an accessible introduction to HF propagation can check out K9LA's propagation site.)
Have you missed the fact that people all across the nation are angry with both republicans and democrats? More than one republican who assumed that he could just get in front of this movement has been booed off the stage.
Politicians are the problem. The republican/democrat distinction is just a distraction. Both sides want to take away your freedoms and your money - they just pay lip service to different ideals when they do it.