Gravity wave insights from internet-beaming balloons
Scientists track tiny atmospheric ripples using data from internet-
beaming balloons

Date:
September 2, 2020
Source:
Stanford University
Summary:
A better understanding of how gravity waves in the upper atmosphere
interact with the jet stream, polar vortex and other phenomena
could be key to improved weather predictions and climate models.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Giant balloons launched into the stratosphere to beam internet service
to Earth have helped scientists measure tiny ripples in our upper
atmosphere, uncovering patterns that could improve weather forecasts
and climate models.


==========================================================================
The ripples, known as gravity waves or buoyancy waves, emerge when blobs
of air are forced upward and then pulled down by gravity. Imagine a
parcel of air that rushes over mountains, plunges toward cool valleys,
shuttles across land and sea and ricochets off growing storms, bobbing
up and down between layers of stable atmosphere in a great tug of war
between buoyancy and gravity. A single wave can travel for thousands of
miles, carrying momentum and heat along the way.

Although lesser known than gravitational waves -- undulations in the
fabric of space-time -- atmospheric gravity waves are ubiquitous and
powerful, said Stanford University atmospheric scientist Aditi Sheshadri, senior author of a new study detailing changes in high-frequency gravity
waves across seasons and latitudes. They cause some of the turbulence
felt on airplanes flying in clear skies and have a strong influence on
how storms play out at ground level.

High-flying balloons Published Aug. 30 in the Journal of Geophysical
Research: Atmospheres, the new research draws on superpressure balloon
data from the company Loon LLC, which designed the balloons to provide
internet access to areas underserved by cell towers or fiber-optic
cables. Spun out of Google parent company Alphabet in 2018, Loon has
sent thousands of sensor-laden balloons sailing 12 miles up in the
stratosphere -- well above the altitude of commercial planes and most
clouds -- for 100 days or more at a stretch.

"This was just a very lucky thing because they weren't collecting data
for any scientific mission. But, incidentally, they happened to be
measuring position and temperature and pressure," said Sheshadri, who
is an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School
of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).



==========================================================================
The researchers calculated gravity wave motions from data that balloons collected over 6,811 separate 48-hour periods from 2014 to 2018. "To
mount an equivalent scientific campaign would be terribly expensive. With
the Loon data, the analysis is messier because the data collection was incidental, but it has near-global coverage," Sheshadri said.

Small waves, planetary impact Gravity waves are an important part of atmospheric dynamics. "They help to drive the overall circulation of
the atmosphere, but some gravity waves are too small and too frequent
to be observed with satellites," said the study's lead author, Erik
Lindgren, who worked on the research as a postdoctoral scholar in
Sheshadri's lab. "These are the gravity waves we have focused on in this study." Earlier studies using atmospheric balloons to track high-frequency gravity waves have typically incorporated data from no more than a few
dozen balloon flights, covering smaller areas and fewer seasons.

The Loon data proved particularly valuable for calculating high-frequency gravity waves, which can rise and fall hundreds of times in a day, over distances ranging from a few hundred feet to hundreds of miles. "They're
tiny and they change on timescales of minutes. But in an integrated
sense, they affect, for instance, the momentum budget of the jet stream,
which is this massive planetary scale thing that interacts with storms
and plays an important role in setting their course," Sheshadri said.

Gravity waves also influence the polar vortex, a swirl of frigid air that usually hovers over the North Pole and can blast extreme cold into parts
of Europe and the United States for months at a time. And they interact
with the quasi-biennial oscillation, in which, roughly every 14 months,
the belt of winds blowing high over the equator reverses direction -- with
big impacts on ozone depletion and surface weather far beyond the tropics.



==========================================================================
As a result, understanding gravity waves is key to improving weather
forecasts at the regional scale, especially as global warming continues
to disrupt historical patterns. "Getting gravity waves right would
help constrain circulation responses to climate change, like how much
it's going to rain in a particular location, the number of storms --
dynamical things such as wind and rain and snow," Sheshadri said.

Building better models Current climate models estimate the effects of high-frequency gravity waves on circulation in a kind of black box, with
few constraints from real-world observations or application of the limited existing knowledge of the physical processes at play. "Until now, it has
not been entirely clear how these waves behave in different regions or
over the seasons at very high frequencies or small scales," Lindgren said.

Sheshadri and colleagues focused on energy associated with high-frequency gravity waves at different time scales, and how that energy varies
across seasons and latitudes. They found these waves are larger and
build up more kinetic energy in the tropics and during the summer;
smaller waves moving with less energy are more common close to the
poles and during the winter. They also found gravity waves changing in
sync with the phases of the quasi-biennial oscillation. "We uncovered
distinct shifts in gravity wave activity at different times of the year
and over different parts of the globe," Lindgren said. "As to exactly
why is not clear." In future research, Sheshadri aims to identify
which gravity wave sources are responsible for these differences, and
to extrapolate gravity wave amplitudes at very high frequencies from
relatively infrequent observations. She said, "Understanding how gravity
waves drive circulation in the atmosphere, the interaction between these
waves and the mean flow -- it's really the next frontier in understanding atmospheric dynamics."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Stanford_University. Original written
by Josie Garthwaite. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Erik A. Lindgren, Aditi Sheshadri, Aure'lien Podglajen, Robert
W. Carver.

Seasonal and Latitudinal Variability of the Gravity Wave Spectrum
in the Lower Stratosphere. Journal of Geophysical Research:
Atmospheres, 2020; DOI: 10.1029/2020JD032850 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200902182424.htm

--- up 1 week, 2 days, 6 hours, 50 minutes
* Origin: -=> Castle Rock BBS <=- Now Husky HPT Powered! (1337:3/111)