Category Archives: atmospheric science

atmospheric science

Probing Earth’s Atmosphere

Leave a comment

Using a Radiosonde

A radiosonde
A radiosonde

When I was a little girl growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I remember one day seeing something floating above our house. As it got closer and closer, I could tell it was a balloon. Then, it floated out of sight. Later that day, my dad went out in the field (we lived on a farm) and found an instrument box attached to a limp balloon. He said it was called a radiosonde.

What a cool word!  Radiosonde. It sounded so exotic and “outer spacey” to me. Daddy called around and found it was a weather balloon sent up by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (which had offices and labs in Boulder).

Radiosondes go up into the atmosphere and take measurements of wind speeds, temperatures, altitudes, humidity, and other characteristics. They also measure the amounts of gases in our atmosphere. These balloons have been major players in atmospheric science since the 1930s.

We got to take the radiosonde back to the scientists, although I don’t remember that event too well. But, to me, that radiosonde was a mysterious and exciting link to the sky and our atmosphere. And, it’s interesting to note that scientists use them every day, around the world, to measure changes in our atmosphere.

atmosphere, climate change, Earth, global warming

Earth is Where It’s At

1 Comment

And It’s All We Have… For Now

https://i0.wp.com/nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/planetary/earth/gal_east-pacific.jpg?resize=474%2C356

Sooner or later, everybody who is interested in space and astronomy gets a look at our planet from “the outside.”  This image, from the Galileo spacecraft during one of its swings around Earth, tells a pretty remarkable story. If you were an incoming alien vessel, you’d see evidence of water. The oceans tell that story, but so do the clouds because they’re made of water vapor. The land masses would tell you that there are places to land on this planet, but at this distance and resolution, you wouldn’t be able to make out plants and animals… or humans and their cities.

If your alien ship had special sensors, it could use spectral analysis to dissect the gases in the atmosphere that blankets the planet. You would find oxygen, nitrogen, plus trace amounts of other gases.  Oh, and carbon dioxide. That’s a biggie. Carbon dioxide (you sometimes see it as CO2) is a by-product of living and geological processed. And, it’s the principal component of the greenhouse gases that we are pumping into our atmosphere from energy generation (driving cars, making electricity, powering manufacturing, etc.). The more greenhouse gases we load into the atmosphere, the warmer our climate is getting. And this is having an effect that future spacecraft will see (and we will have to live with).

As you can see from this picture, our atmosphere looks pretty thin when compared to the vastness of space and the size of our own planet. In fact, if you look at other planetary atmospheres in the solar system, you find them to be thick and heavy (Venus, the gas giants), or thin and possibly even fragile (Mars, Earth, some of the smaller moons of the outer solar system). What we learn about atmospheres is important, since our own planet has the only one that we know of that has harbored (and possibly even helped begin) life.  That makes what we’re doing to it with carbon dioxide a pretty major “experiment.”