Tropical Storms

Thor and the Hulk may be more closely related than we thought. Thunderstorms are known to produce gamma rays in the atmosphere, but a new study has found that not only do they happen way more often than we realized, but they’re much weirder.

Climate change will trigger stronger storms more often, and the threat may not be properly communicated. Now, scientists at Berkeley Lab suggest there’s room for a Category 6 on the scale – with five storms in the past decade reaching that strength.

Ahead of the start of the Atlantic hurricane season next month, two storm-monitoring NASA CubeSats have successfully launched into space atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster from the Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula.

The best bits of thunderstorms often happen above the clouds. Scientists have now described in detail the most powerful “gigantic jet” of lightning ever observed, which blasted energy equivalent to 60 regular lightning bolts upwards into space.

A new type of storm has been discovered in the skies over the Indian Ocean. Named “atmospheric lakes,” these events are slow-moving pools of concentrated water vapor that can last for days and bring large amounts of rain to the surface below them.

A new study has revealed yet another way that human-induced climate change is affecting the planet. Decades of weather balloon and satellite data has shown that the Earth’s troposphere is expanding, even after natural variations are accounted for.

Using advanced infrared imaging technology aboard an Earth-orbiting satellite, scientists have measured the coldest temperature of a storm cloud on record, owing to an overshooting top that penetrated the stratosphere.

​Wind storms can cause a great deal of damage to coastal areas, producing waves that erode the shoreline and destroy facilities such as marinas. A newly-proposed "floating forest" could help, however, by blocking both the wind and the waves.

A new study out of MIT suggests rising temperatures are causing energy shifts in Earth's atmosphere that are strengthening midlatitude storms, while weakening other important weather systems over North America, Europe and Asia.

NOAA flew a scientific aircraft right through Hurricane Patricia in 2015. Now, the researchers have reported their findings, including the detection of a beam of antimatter being blasted towards the ground, accompanied by flashes of x-rays and gamma rays.

There’s much more to lightning than a flash and thunder. Lightning strikes have been known to generate gamma rays, and now a team of Japanese researchers has found that those bursts can create photonuclear reactions in the atmosphere, resulting in the production – and annihilation – of antimatter.

​​Researchers are developing a system to predict the path and intensity of hurricanes by harvesting data from inside the storm itself.