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Space Traffic May Be Creating More Clouds
seagirlreed writes "Rocket traffic may be adding water to the Earth's mesosphere, leading to more very high clouds in this layer of thin air on the edge of space. From the article: 'A team of researchers looking for an expected decrease in the number of clouds in this layer, as solar activity and heating have ramped up, were instead surprised to find an increase in the number and brightness of clouds in this near-outer-space region over the last two years. ... The source of the water to make the clouds is a puzzle, Siskind explained, because there is not much sign of it coming up into the mesosphere. On the other hand, rockets and, until recently, shuttles roaming in space could rain water exhaust down into the mesosphere.'"
with 1 stone... put lots of rockets up and build something cool like a Elysium space city, or maybe a space elevator. And solve global warming at the same time!
Probably worth noting that this refers to noctilucent clouds (NLCs) which occur in polar regions.
The findings of NASA's AIM satellite are, as of yet, inexplicable. Therefore, what's mentioned here is purely speculative.
If we would lose the ozon layer would creating more of these clouds be a possible solution? TM by the way.
Forget the models - Do we get our glaciers back?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
to confuse the C02 argument even further.
Or perhaps simply to overlook the CO2 (and by the way, it is C oh 2, not C zero 2) issue completely, in their quest to blame some specific activity.
Since CO2 levels have recently pass the 400 ppm level for the first time in "recorded history" (ignoring for the moment that nobody recorded this until last 50 years or so), the source of the clouds could be a natural reaction to the increased CO2, and the claimed increase in world temperatures.
Since the article says:
'A team of researchers looking for an expected decrease in the number of clouds in this layer, as solar activity and heating have ramped up,
Yet in years past they were predicting increases cloud cover at all altitudes as one of the outcomes of increased temperatures. So why were they expecting a decrease?
It seems far more likely to me that they have their model wrong than it is likely that the puny number of launches of late have dumped that many tons of water in the mesosphere.
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Since CO2 levels have recently pass the 400 ppm level for the first time in "recorded history" (ignoring for the moment that nobody recorded this until last 50 years or so),:
You forget the well-known practice of extracting the air from bubbles in ice cores, for direct measures.
At half a gram per cubic metre or 0.0005 kg/m^3, your 10^6 kg would make a cloud of 2 cubic kilometers, or two typical cumulus clouds.
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Are you saying /doters are posting speculative assumptions to explain inconclusive observations.
Them is fightin words, sir! Pistols at sunrise.
Since there hasn't been a significant increase in rocket launches in the last two years, rocket launches can't be the explanation for an increase in noctilucent clouds in the last two years.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
They reflect incoming light. and outgoing heat.
To first order, in fact, clouds don't have a significant effect on average temperature (if they reflect incident light and exiting infrared equally well, the effects cancel). They do have a big effect on the day/night temperature variation (cloud-free days have high daytime temperatures and low nighttime temperature.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
FWIW, there is some indication that Noctilucent clouds in the mesosphere have been only been around since the industrial revolution times (since there aren't really any earlier descriptions of the phenomena in recorded history unlike other atmospheric anomolies like auroras or sundogs), so it's a bit presumputous that the effect has been greatly effected by space traffic vs some other human terrestrial source. It is also suspected that since this phenomena appears to also track the solar cycle, the most recent solar cycle (24) got off to a late start (by a couple of years), and they also noted this phenomena was a bit higher than normal the last couple of years and they don't really know much about this phenomena, so it's hard to get too excited about this yet...
On the other hand, there is much more airplane traffic vs space traffic and airplane contrails apparently have a much larger effect.
Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
This is Richard Linzen's "Iris" hypothesis. One of the few plausible bits of actual science from the so-called climate skeptics. Unfortunately, it seems not to work and was thoroughly refuted about ten years ago.
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I'm looking forward to getting these back!
It's more like scientists making mild suggestions requiring further research and the media taking that as "Rocket launches are going to cause permanent overcast skies within 20 years!!!"
Forget the models - Do we get our glaciers back?
Yep. At the very next ice age. Coming soon (in geological terms) to a theater near you.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Glaciers shmaciers. Think of all the prime real estate opening up on Greenland.
Always good to include a citation...
Keeling: The reconstructions before the ice core period, which take us only back 800,000 years, are a lot less secure. In the case of ice cores, we actually have samples of old air. And subject to some small caveats, you can simply analyze those and figure it out. In earlier geologic eras, the reconstruction of carbon dioxide depends on more indirect measurements. The work of people like Mark Pagani at Yale, who is in the business of reconstructing paleo CO2, shows that the last time that CO2 was around this level was probably in the mid-Pliocene, 2 to 4 million years ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/14/record-400ppm-co2-carbon-emissions
There's no single model - just like with fluid flow in general.
Climategate sounded like a scandal to some but just sounded like people chatting about how to reduce noise in noisy data to others. Next up, the scandal when it's revealed that sausages do not contain 100% lean beef which is not a scandal if you think about how they have to stick together and cook properly. In other words "Climategate" was about ignorant people reading words out of context and manufacturing a fake scandal.
For real scandals you have to look at things like the guy that faked the link between a preservative used in vaccines and autism so that he could sell his own preservative.
It was refuted by, among others, his own department, including his own doctoral students using his own and then later results. Actually refute is too strong a word because the effect was more precisely quantified and found to be far smaller than expected. Heat is reflected just not as much as was initially suggested.
the source of the clouds could be a natural reaction to the increased CO2
It could be but it isn't. Water vapour from the troposphere does not generally get into the stratosphere let alone the mesosphere unless put there by a tall volcanic plume or a machine. Once the water is up that high it doesn't fall back down easily, rather it is slowly broken down by radiation and the hydrogen tends to leak off into space.
Yet in years past they were predicting increases cloud cover at all altitudes
Umm, no the prediction was more water vapour and less cloud in the troposphere, there has been very little done in the way of research into clouds in the mesosphere so any prediction there was likely just speculation. The prediction for the change in tropospheric cloud cover was very uncertain, climate scientists will tell you that ALL clouds are poorly understood and of the various types ultra high level cloud is the most mysterious. The predicted increase in vapour itself was made with a very high level of confidence due to the well understood physics involved. Also note that CO2 has a cooling effect in the stratosphere and above, which was a prediction of models in the 80's and has since been observed via satellite. (google "stratospheric cooling")
Why "less cloud" I'm not sure but water vapour has increased by ~4% since 1980 and cloud cover has very slightly decreased since 2000 (although it's debatable that there has been any change at all). The odd thing about water vapour is that it is almost exclusively found in the troposphere and the troposphere is always very close to chemically saturated* with it, the only way to change it is by changing either the pressure or temperature of the troposphere.
chemically saturated* - google: "dew point" and realize the altitude at where it occurs is always below the troposphere/stratosphere boundary which makes for extremely dry upper layers of the atmosphere.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Richard Linzen's "Iris" hypothesis has be weighed by Science and found wanting. Nothing in Science prevents scientists from researching the Iris idea further but the vast majority won't because they have already debunked it to their own satisfaction and found something more interesting.
In less kind words Linzen's book is like the popular "Chariots of gods" from the 70's in that it attempts to baffle lay-people with speculative bullshit that just "sounds right".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Quite apart from all this wonderful science being thrown around, which is quite beyond poor old me, would there even be enough waste water being left by the rockets to account for these vasty high clouds? They're very small things, comparatively. And as slew mentions, if it were airplane contrails, there's a lot more air traffic than surface-to-space.
They obviously meant all altitudes "normal" clouds appear. Mesosphere is way higher than were normal clouds ever form (the atmosphere) and water (vapour) never gets there by normal weather or climatic influences that we know of. The whole idea is that they have water there they can't explain properly. Their hypothesis is that it's coming from exhaust of rocket engines, but they aren't sure. There is no indication this has anything to do with the prediction that there will be increased cloud cover in the atmosphere due to increased temperatures on the surface of the planet.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
"Rocket traffic". The first time ever I saw these two words written together as a new, compound expression for a new concept. The XXIst century has very well begun :-))
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This.
As an aside, light pollution in my area is bad enough that it's not easy to see these noctilucent clouds. Between that pollution and clouds, it's nigh impossible to see much of the night sky; I consider that one of the problems afflicting city dwellers is the inability to see the nighttime sky, which might otherwise provide for feeling humility and awe.
Others have pointed out that it doesn't actually work that way, but not why.
Clouds are made out of water, water absorbs UV (rather than reflecting it) and radiates IR. But it radiates it in all directions. It takes about two feet of liquid water to absorb all of the UV, which is why you can still get a sunburn on a cloudy day. UV is still coming through, and now (due to the influence of the clouds) it's coming in at all angles. UV coming in at an angle has less chance to be reflected into space, and more chance to hit the ground. Meanwhile, much of the IR radiated by the clouds will strike the planet. So in fact, the amount of energy reflected by the clouds is not nearly as much as you might think. And much of what is reflected is reflected not by the top layer of clouds, but by a subsequent layer. Some of that will simply be reflected down again. In the process it's also lending heat energy to the atmosphere, which will be released over time; some of it outwards into space, and some of it downwards into Earth.
TL;DR clouds are not made of mylar, HTH
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Are you sure he didn't mean "koans"?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.