NASA discovered an unusual phenomenon in the atmosphere during Hurricane Helen

Passage of a hurricane has a variety of impacts on the Earth and, consequently, in the lives of people: although it depends on their category, in general these adverse meteorological phenomena cause infrastructure destructiondamage to homes and even loss of life. Description that fits perfectly scene left by Helen after making landfall on September 26 in Florida, USA.

Now NASA has discovered that this disaster also had effects high in the atmosphere. At an altitude of 55 miles above the earth (88 kilometers), a phenomenon was discovered that was rarely recorded in the past by the scientific community: the appearance of huge atmospheric gravity waves which spread from the north of the state “like water rings in a pond,” according to Ludger Scherliss, AWE principal investigator at Utah State University at Logan.

This was made possible thanks to images from NASA’s Atmospheric Wave Experiment (AWE), an active mission launched in November 2023, whose goal is scan space for wave structures in the air resulting from meteorological events on Earth, such as tornadoes, thunderstorms, tsunamis or hurricanes.

This is how atmospheric gravitational waves are detected

AWE is installed on the International Space Station (ISS) and is designed, as we already mentioned, to detect phenomena similar to the one mentioned in this news. But what are atmospheric gravitational waves? First, NASA insists that the term should not be confused with the phenomenon of space-time predicted by Einstein in 1915.