Stormy With a Chance of Gravity Waves
Parts of the country have been getting womped with a storm the last few days, with some parts of the Midwest and northeast getting as much two feet or more of snow, not to mention thousands of canceled flights. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency released this photo taken yesterday by their GOES-13 satellite. We've posted storm photos before, but this one is particularly interesting: in the lower left, centering over Maryland, are a series of gravity waves. Gravity waves, as the Space Physics Research Group at U.C. Berkeley describes:
...are the oscillations of air parcels by the lifting force of buoyancy and the restoring force of gravity. These waves propagate vertically as well as horizontally, and actively transport energy and momentum from the troposphere to the middle and upper atmosphere.
NOAA / GOES-13
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