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.

For its part, this happens when moisture-saturated air

detects an imbalance in air density, creating parallel bands of clouds oriented perpendicular to the wind directionwhich are detected from the ISS due to their peculiar shape: they look like concentric waves that occur when we throw a stone over the pond.

In the case of Hurricane Helen, the waves were identified by AWE as concentric stripes (artificially colored red, yellow and blue) which undulated west of the northwest coast of Florida, as captured in images found among the first published this mission.

Relationship between atmospheric gravity waves and climate

AWE’s detection of atmospheric gravity waves shows the instrument has the sensitivity “to detect the impact of hurricanes on Earth’s upper atmosphere,” NASA said. And in this sense, the agency leaves the door open for Continue to explore to what extent they are related climatological phenomena with atmospheric behavior.

The focus is on understanding like hurricanes and other natural disasters They have the ability to disable satellites and other technologies.

And in a world where severe weather events are expected to be more frequent and intensefuture of space communications can be exposed to these atmospheric gravity waves, which today, thanks to the development of sophisticated instruments such as AWE, They are no longer invisible.