Storms Across the Solar System | NASA Science Live Episode 4

Storms Across the Solar System

Storms Across the Solar System

Hello and welcome to NASA Science Live.

I'm your host, Yogesh Bhamare.

The beauty of the gateway is it can be moved between orbits. it will ban between the earth and the moon's gravity.

In a position ideal for launching everybody deeper space missions.

In 2009 we learned the moon contains millions of tons of water ice.

This could racteded asked purified for water and separate oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for rocket fuel.

Moon is uniquely suited to prepare us and propel to us mars and beyond.

Humans are the most fragile element of this entire endeavour, and yet we go for humanity.

We go to the moon and onto mars to seek knowledge and understanding and to share it with all.

We go knowing our efforts will create opportunities that cannot be foreseen.

We go because we are destined today to explore and see it with our own eyes, we turn towards the moon now not as a contingent, but as preparation.

As a checkpoint toward all that lies beyond thinking our greatest advent us.

We were watching you know the Moon landing and I told mom I wanted to go to the Moon, that day I told mom I wanted to go to the moon.

Basically what she told me was you can be anything that you want to, Just put your mind to it and work hard and you never know.

To me, that was Just a tremendous Inspiration for me as a young woman seeing that a technical career.

That a career in Leadership In a mathematical or a scientific field was was possible.

People that just gave me confidence and gave me the, you know, The idea that I could do it and I Should try because there's nothing wrong with trying.

We have the power within us to really be whoever we want to be and if we want To be engineers Scientists or astronauts or whatever What have you.

You know that We can do that. It is important to have The diversity, Not just in, not Just in disciplines and in technical expertise, but in Walks of life.

I have many times Found myself to be The only woman in the room.

Young girls Nowadays that the many role models and so many  Examples and so many Places they can say I want to be like her.

 All right, to today's topic, we're talking about storms across the solar system.

And we're going to start by talking about how storms form on earth, and then we'll see the conditions that cause them to happen on other planets.

In a weather forecast from across the solar system, and finally take a look how looks storms on our own planet and we're going to release a weather balloon live during this episode.

So if you want to learn more about NASA's effort to study hurricanes.

We're loud at NASA's flight facility where we look at how weather data is turned into the easy forecast you get on the phone's weather app.

We're going to be launching a weather balloon today. As the balloon is up to 100,000 feet in altitude, it's taking measurements.

Here to talk about that is adam Thomas.

 What do we have behind us today?

Balloon inflation shelter and pilchard have inflated that balloon and hopefully, we will release it at the end of the show today.

What data is it looking for, what do you have in your hands here?

A radiosonde attached to the balloon and has Instrumentation here, temperature sensor, humidity, also GPS track.

We get wind speed and direction in the device as it ascends into the atmosphere.

How often does NASA launch these things?

Twice a day here at wallops, twice a day every day and some instances more than twice a day.

If we have a hurricane, severe weather outbreaks,  national weather service program will ask for more balloon releases.

Sometimes up to four balloon releases a day, especially for storms such as maria and Florence just recently.

We had to get more data and more up to date data with the extra balloon releases.

So getting that this happens right here, sounds like we need the radiosonde attached and get the balloon up ready for flight.

We've got a balloon to set up. I am so excited about this balloon and looking forward to it being released later on in the show.

So today I have Dalia, a research scientist at Goddard spaceflight centre, and come back down to earth and something we are familiar with.

How do storms form here?

that's right. So tropical cyclones are actually catch all term, but they're called different things depending on where you live.

For example, in the Atlantic or eastern pacific, we call them hurricanes.

In the western pacific, we call them typhoons and in the Indian ocean, we call them cyclones.

You need three different ingredients for a storm to form. You need really warm ocean water you need pre-existing storms and you need humid air.

What happens when a storm forms that humid air starts to rise, and as it rises, there's more air that comes into filling it inside, and so we start to have warm air rising.

You get a lot of convection which causes clouds and precipitation and that movement inward, upward and outward starts the storm moving.

 But because the storm the earth rotates on an that causes the storm to rotate like we see the eye the storm.

Because that strong pool of warm water is starting fuel the storm just like gas fuels our car.

As the storm begins to develop, it starts moving faster winds and more rainfall.

What we see from space is we can get a view of how the storms are moving and changing.

All depending on where the winds blowing and how warm the surface of the oceans.

Great, we already have questions for you.

What is the biggest hurricane we've seen?

We've had satellites and before that instruments on the ground measuring this for a long time.

The most intense storm we ever saw is typhoon which occurred in the Philippines and it was 1300 miles across.

That's humongous! Not only a category 5 but a super typhoon with sustained winds over 160 miles per her.

A follow-up question for that is how damaging are these storms?

A lot of the damage is caused by winds, which is what's happening in the eyewall of the storm, the winds are whipping around in the middle. 

The eye is very calm, but as yet further out, the winds are important but the rain and the rain bands around it tend to cause a lot of the flooding

That we see as well as the storm surge that pushes that water onto land when it makes landfall.

it's important to recast and understand the storms move and intensify.

We can really understand how they're going to impact people once they hit land.

That's a lot digest right there. One very quick question, we talked about the width a little bit.

Is there anything unusual heights or how high up they are ?

Sure, so as these storms the air starts to rise, we're able to see three-dimensional profiles of storms up to 15 kilometres in height.

 That's way higher than where planes fly.

So with satellites like the global Precipitation Measurement mission, we can see three-dimensionally through the clouds.

All the way up into the atmosphere, how the storm is distributed in terms of the heavy rainfall.

That's really important to provide clues to forecasters to understand where the storms get-go importantly how intense they might be.