Hurricane Helene made landfall in the United States on September 26 , hit the Gulf Coast of Florida . Its way of life of death and demolition was monitored in particular from the ground and space , and it was even blemish by an instrument located on the International Space Station . As the ISS fly over it , the Atmospheric Waves Experiment ( AWE ) saw how the hurricane was shaking the air far above the storm .
These shakes are jazz as gravity waves – which are not have-to doe with togravitational waves . The latter are formed by the literal rattling of infinite - time and you ask huge detectors to evaluate them . somberness wave instead take form at the interface of two fluids or between two regions of the atmospheric state with different properties . Waves on the surface of the ocean are an exemplar of gravity waves .
Hurricane Heleneslammed not just the land but the atmosphere too . The energy and heating plant come from the large tropic tempest created huge swells recorded at an altitude of almost 90 km ( 55 miles ) , just diffident of the established edge of blank space . Hurricanes tend to be about one - one-sixth of that height .
“ Like rings of H2O spread from a drop in a pool , circular waves from Helene are see billowing westward from Florida ’s northwest coast , ” Ludger Scherliess , the AWE principal police detective at Utah State University in Logan , order in astatement .
While seeing waves in the ocean is very exonerated to our eye , in the atmosphere , these gravitational force undulation are invisible to us . Satellites , however , can measure them , and in several ways . For example , satellites that trail H2O vaporisation can spot them because the quantity will change if you are within the flower or the vale formed by the overtaking of these wave .
AWE focus on colorful bands of igniter known as airglow to measure the wave in the upper atmospheric state . This is important to understand the fundamental interaction between infinite weather and the layer of melodic phrase that ring our satellite .
somberness waves in the atmosphere are a common phenomenon . NASA released abeautiful imageof wave spring around an island two years ago , for lesson . They are also not exclusively an Earthly phenomenon . They have been seen in the tenuous gasbag of Pluto , the dense air ofVenus , and even on Jupiter just aboveits Big Red Spot .
