As if they don't already have enough on their plate, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are turning storm chasers. On April 13, a remote controlled robotic arm installed the Space Storm Hunter instrument package that will make an extensive survey of terrestrial thunderstorms.
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Ball lightning has been consistently reported for centuries, and yet we still know very little about it. Now, scientists have created quantum ball lightning by knotting together the magnetic spins of atoms, which could help unlock the secrets of the phenomenon, or make more stable fusion reactors.
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Fresh air might not be quite as fresh as we think. Viruses and bacteria get swept up into the atmosphere in enormous amounts, and now a new study has quantified that amount, finding that untold billions of microorganisms are raining down across the Earth every day.
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NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have both released reports stating that 2017 was one of the hottest years since records began in 1880. That continues a long-term trend of rapid warming that doesn’t bode well for the future.
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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.
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With the once controversial idea of battling climate change through geoenginnering slowly gaining popularity, new research from the University of Exeter offers evidence that this untested approach could result in climate chaos.
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A NASA study has analyzed data gathered by the OCO-2 satellite and pinpointed the cause of an unprecedented spike in atmospheric CO2 in 2015 and 2016: the El Nino weather effect caused certain tropical regions to release far more CO2 than they normally would.
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NASA estimates that around a thousand gamma ray bursts are produced by storms each day and has been using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to gain a better understanding of these high-energy events, which have tens of millions of times the energy of visible light.
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Looking to cater for people who really need to know the exact readings right where they are, Weather@Point is a keychain-sized device that plugs into your phone to provide real-time data on temperature, humidity, UV levels and atmospheric pressure.
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The National Weather Service's network of sensors may soon welcome aboard a high-flying counterpart, in the form of a NASA-developed fixed wing glider that zips through the sky collecting data.
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