Powerful Typhoon Sinlaku strikes the Northern Marianas 🌑🚀🧑‍🚀

#Artemis #Atmosphere #AtmosphericPhenomena #Atmosphericscience #EarthScience #Hydrology #Location #Moon

⏩ 1 new picture and 2 new videos from NASA (SVS) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles?limit=5&user=OptimusPrimeBot&ilshowall=1&offset=20260417125647

Explaining the Swirl of Wildfire Smoke

In recent years, smoke from powerful wildfires has raised questions among atmospheric scientists by always swirling in the same direction. The confounding structures were observed in the stratosphere, where smoke injected at around 15 kilometers in altitude absorbed sunlight and rose further, up to about 35 kilometers of altitude. The rising column of fluid would stretch, causing any residual rotation to get stronger and form vortices.

None of this was a surprise. What was surprising is that all of the observed vortices were anticyclones, when theory–at least for a heat-driven vortex from a stationary heating source–called for a cyclone-anticyclone pair.

Researchers looked at how a self-heating (and, therefore, moving) source would rotate. They concluded that this, too, would create a pair of vortices–one cyclonic and one anticyclonic–but the anticyclone would be stronger than the cyclone that trailed behind it. By further considering the vertical shear the vortex pair would encounter, the researchers found that the trailing cyclone could get stripped away, leaving behind only the anticyclone–matching our wildfire observations. (Image credit: J. Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory; research credit: K. Shah and P. Haynes 1, 2; via APS)

🧊 Since 2020, the total ice mass in #Antarctica has stopped decreasing. How?

Researchers from the UG & KNMI found that a sharp increase in snowfall is mainly due to ‘atmospheric rivers’ transporting extra moist air to the ice sheet.🌨️

Curious? Read more 👇
🔗 https://www.rug.nl/fse/news/climate-and-nature/2026/more-ice-in-antarctica-due-to-increased-snowfall

🧪 #SciComm #ScienceNewsroom #environmental #research #atmospheric #science #meteorology #atmosphericscience #oceanography #scientistsOnMastodon @universityofgroningen @knmi

Observing Ice Giant Atmospheres

Uranus is one of our solar system’s oddest inhabitants, stuck spinning on its side with a tilted and offset magnetosphere. To better understand it, a team observed the planet for 17 hours with JWST. The near-infrared measurements gave new insight into the planet’s ionosphere, where auroras form. They found that temperatures peaked between 3,000 and 4,000 kilometers, while ion densities peaked at 1,000 kilometers. They also confirmed previous observations that Uranus’s upper atmosphere is cooling down. (Image and video credit: ESA/Webb/NASA/CSA/STScI/P. Tiranti/H. Melin/M. Zamani; research credit: P. Tiranti et al.; via Gizmodo)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jsn1829OPw