Researchers from Lincoln Laboratory and NASA are working on the TROPICS mission to study tropical cyclones, reports Bella Isaacs-Thomas for the PBS NewsHour. “Technology today — finally — allows us to miniaturize these satellites, fly a lot of them and get that temporal update that we’ve been wanting for so long,” explains Laboratory Fellow William Blackwell.
Prof. Susan Solomon and Eugenia Kalnay PhD ’71 are featured in a Washington Post piece highlighting “leading women in atmospheric and climate sciences who have forged the path to better our knowledge of the weather and world around us.” Solomon is an “internationally recognized as a leader in atmospheric sciences for her work in explaining the cause of the ‘hole in the ozone’ over Antarctica.”
The Conversation reporter Stacy Morford spotlights research by climatologist Judah Cohen and atmospheric scientist Mathew Barlow, which shows how changes in the Arctic can lead to changes in the stratospheric polar vortex, and cold waves in North America and Asia. “Our research reinforces two crucial lessons of climate change: First, the change doesn’t have to occur in your backyard to have a big effect on you,” write Cohen and Barlow. “Second, the unexpected consequences can be quite severe.”
Inside Science reporter Will Sullivan writes that a new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that during Covid-19 lockdowns in the spring of 2020 there was a reduction in human activities that release aerosols into the atmosphere, resulting in diminished lightning activity.
A new study by MIT researchers finds that air pollution can enhance lightning sparked by wildfires, reports Nikk Ogasa for Science. Ogasa notes that the researchers “also found that air pollution did more than enhance lightning; wildfire smoke more than tripled the intensity of thundershowers.”
In an article for CNN about the genesis of the term bomb cyclone, Brandon Miller notes how MIT researchers Fred Sanders and John Gyakum used the term to describe storms that strengthen rapidly. Miller explains that they “adjusted the ground rules to vary based on latitude. And they added the term ‘bomb’ because of the explosive power that these storms derive from rapid pressure drops.”