Latest Atmospheric convection Stories

WASHINGTON, May 9, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA researchers have flown off on a campaign that is taking them into the heart of thunderstorm country. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) The Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) field campaign is using an airport in Salina, Kan., as a base to explore the impact of large thunderstorms on the concentration of ozone and other substances in the upper troposphere. The campaign is being led by...

It's one of the more frustrating parts of summer. You check the weather forecast, see nothing dramatic, and go hiking or biking. Then, four hours later, a thunderstorm appears out of nowhere and ruins your afternoon.Thunderstorms can bring intense rain, hail, lightning and even tornadoes, but "predicting them a few hours out is one of the great problems of meteorology," says Chian-Yi Liu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.And the consequences can be...

Scientists have long known that atmospheric convection in the form of hurricanes and tropical ocean thunderstorms tends to occur when sea surface temperature rises above a threshold. The critical question is, how do rising ocean temperatures with global warming affect this threshold? If the threshold does not rise, it could mean more frequent hurricanes.According to a new study by researchers at the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), this...

Wind shear strength determines whether pollution swells or saps stormsNew climate research reveals how wind shear -- the same atmospheric conditions that cause bumpy airplane rides -- affects how pollution contributes to isolated thunderstorm clouds. Under strong wind shear conditions, pollution hampers thunderhead formation. But with weak wind shear, pollution does the opposite and makes storms stronger.The work improves climate scientists' understanding of how aerosols -- tiny unseen...

Drifting of the large tectonic plates and the superimposed continents is not only powered by the heat-driven convection processes in the Earth's mantle, but rather retroacts on this internal driving processes. In doing so, the continents function as a thermal blanket, which leads to an accumulation of heat underneath, and which in turn can cause the break-up of the super-continents.These results of numerical modeling have been published by scientists from the GFZ German Research Centre for...

By Vaughan, G Schiller, C; MacKenzie, A R; Bower, K; Peter, T; Schlager, H; Harris, N R P; May, P T A multinational field campaign in Australia studied the effect of deep convection on the composition of the tropical tropopause layer. This article describes the Stratospheric-Climate Links with Emphasis on the Upper Troposphere and Lower Stratosphere (SCOUT-O3) and Aerosol and Chemical Transport in Deep Convection (ACTIVE) field campaign conducted in Darwin, Australia (12.47[degrees]S,...

Stunning simulations that give a multi-dimensional glimpse into the interior of stars show that material bubbling around the convection zone induces a rich spectrum of internal gravity waves in the stable layers above and below.The swirling simulations, which are reminiscent of Van Gogh's star paintings, show the interior of a star during the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) phase, the final stage of a low- and intermediate-mass star's life before it becomes a white dwarf. It is during this...