Atmosphere

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) spacecraft encapsulated atop is raised to a vertical position at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Monday, February 5, 2024. PACE is NASA’s newest earth-observing satellite that will help increase our understanding of Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and climate by delivering hyperspectral observations of microscopic marine organisms called phytoplankton as well as new data on clouds and aerosols.…

Last week, the Ingenuity Mars helicopter made its final flight, far exceeding the expectations of a mission that began nearly three years ago. Now, NASA may be looking at a fixed-wing aircraft to hit the red planet's skies next.In 2021 the Perseverance rover landed on Mars carrying a small helicopter under its belly named Ingenuity. The twin rotor craft was a demonstrator to test if a vehicle could fly in the thin Martian air, which is only about one per cent as dense as our atmosphere on Earth.It became the first…

Some residents of British Columbia's Okanagan Valley were briefly enveloped in shades of pink and purple this morning.In Kelowna, a pink-hued fog appeared for several minutes shortly after 7:30 a.m. PT before returning to the more standard grey."I thought, 'OK, what's going on out there?'" said Lise Guyot of her reaction when she saw the world turn pink through her window, before she snapped some photos."It looked surreal."The pink fog appeared in parts of the Okanagan Valley at about 7:30 a.m. PT on Wednesday. (Lise…

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This weekly newsletter is part of a CBC News initiative entitled "Our Changing Planet" to show and explain the effects of climate change. Keep up with the latest news on our Climate and Environment page.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday.This week: How effective a climate solution is removing CO2 from the atmosphere? Cruise ships: Do we really need a bigger boat? AI is being used to fight climate change, but it has its own emissions problem…

A multi-institutional team of researchers characterized how solar radiation from the sun interacts with individual tar balls dispersed over a mountainous region in northern Italy. Credit: Environmental Science & Technology (2023). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.3c03498 Days after a wildfire, a type of smoke can linger in the atmosphere that contains tiny, brown, light-absorbing particles known as tar balls. These particles are…

Astronomers using Hubble have detected water vapor in the atmosphere of GJ 9827d, a small exoplanet, suggesting the presence of water-rich atmospheres on similar planets. This discovery marks a significant step in exploring the composition and evolution of exoplanetary atmospheres. credit: SciTechDaily.comSteamy World Could Be a Sample of Water-Rich Planets Throughout Our GalaxyThe search for life in space goes hand-in-hand with the search for water on planets around other stars. Water is one of the most common molecules…

This illustration by Benjamin Storer shows oceanic weather systems (mesoscale eddies) from data overlaid with atmospherically driven climate-scale currents (black lines), which can be extracted with a coarse-graining technique developed in the lab of Hussein Aluie. The image reveals how these ocean weather systems are energized (red) or weakened (blue) when interacting with climate-scales, which follows a pattern mirroring the global atmospheric circulation. Credit: University of Rochester / Benjamin StorerThe team…

Examples of box flights around five major surface mining facilities on different days show elevated downwind total gaseous organic carbon with total emissions derived with TERRA (supplementary materials, materials and methods). Numeric values in white indicate average TC emission rates. Credit: Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adj6233 An international team of chemical and environmental engineers has found that oil sands…

Apple As Apple makes final preparations for the release of the Vision Pro on February 2, more details have been emerging about how the company plans to present the mixed-reality headset to people visiting its retails stores. With the Vision Pro being the most important product release for Apple since the launch of the Apple Watch nearly a decade ago, the tech giant is leaving nothing to chance. Staff at Apple Stores in the U.S., where the Vision Pro will launch first, have been given special training on how to give…

Canada's forestry sector is responsible for far more greenhouse gas emissions than show up in official tallies, potentially leading to policies that aren't in line with the country's climate goals, a new study suggests.The peer-reviewed study, published in the academic journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, found that annual greenhouse gas emissions attributable to forestry between 2005 and 2021 were, on average, nearly 91 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent — which would put the sector on par with…