On Sept. 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene slammed into the Gulf Coast of Florida, inducing storm surges and widespread impacts on communities in its path. On the similar time, NASA’s Atmospheric Waves Experiment, or AWE, recorded monumental swells within the environment that the hurricane produced roughly 55 miles above the bottom. Such info helps us higher perceive how terrestrial climate can have an effect on house climate, a part of the analysis NASA does to know how our house surroundings can disrupt satellites, communication indicators, and different expertise.
These huge ripples via the higher environment, often called atmospheric gravity waves, seem in AWE’s photos as concentric bands (artificially coloured right here in purple, yellow, and blue) extending away from northern Florida.
“Like rings of water spreading from a drop in a pond, round waves from Helene are seen billowing westward from Florida’s northwest coast,” stated Ludger Scherliess, who’s the AWE principal investigator at Utah State College in Logan.
Launched in November 2023 and mounted on the surface of the Worldwide Area Station, the AWE instrument appears down at Earth, scanning for atmospheric gravity waves, ripple-like patterns within the air generated by atmospheric disturbances akin to violent thunderstorms, tornadoes, tsunamis, wind bursts over mountain ranges, and hurricanes. It does this by in search of brightness fluctuations in colourful bands of sunshine referred to as airglow in Earth’s mesosphere. AWE’s research of those gravity waves created by terrestrial climate helps NASA pinpoint how they have an effect on house climate.
These views of gravity waves from Hurricane Helene are among the many first publicly launched photos from AWE, confirming that the instrument has the sensitivity to disclose the impacts hurricanes have on Earth’s higher environment.
