The turbulent pockets of air inside storms can help to build up static electricity in the atmosphere, according to a new study.
wind
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Curiosity Spies Shifting Sands on Mars
Images from the rover’s pioneering encounter with sand dunes on Mars constrain wind speeds required to move sand in the thin Martian atmosphere.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
How Does Wind Push Water?
A new 3-D model shows how wind affects hydrodynamic mixing in a northern Italian lake.
Posted inScience Updates
Monitoring Wind in Portugal’s Mountains Down to Microscales
Researchers are now gathered for the Perdigão field campaign, an effort to study wind flow physics at scales down to tens of meters. The effort should help engineers harness wind energy in Europe.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Mars's Atmosphere Matches Earth's Turbulent Nature
Mars is even more like Earth than we thought, according to a statistical analysis of the planet's swirling atmosphere.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Mysterious Anomaly Interrupts Stratospheric Wind Pattern
For the first time, scientists have observed a deviation from the typical alternating pattern of easterly and westerly winds in the equatorial stratosphere.
Posted inNews
Interior Approves Wind Farm Leasing Offshore from New York City
The proposed wind farm, which commercial fishermen oppose, could produce at least 70 megawatts of energy annually, enough to power a quarter of a million homes.
Posted inNews
Humans Misread Wind Speeds, Skewing a Major Hazards Database
Weather spotters who report storm measurements and observations to a U.S. national compendium of storm data often exaggerate winds speeds—by about one third, on average.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
How Regional Wind Patterns Will Influence Climate Change
Climate change is expected to cause wet regions to get wetter and dry regions to get drier, but new research suggests that the truth is more complicated.
Posted inNews
Storms Cause Infrequent Turbulence for Aircraft, New Study Finds
Scientists using lightning sensors to automate air-turbulence detection have found evidence that storms jostle aircraft much less than previously thought.