Preparations for the launch of the new Earth observation satellite EarthCARE (Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer) at the end of May are in full swing. The joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan ...
Earth Sciences
May 23, 2024
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NASA's "Wildfire Digital Twin" project will equip firefighters and wildfire managers with a superior tool for monitoring wildfires and predicting harmful air pollution events and help researchers observe global wildfire trends ...
Earth Sciences
May 21, 2024
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25
Recently, an international team led by Prof. Ge Jian from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted a search for rare weak signals in quasar spectral data released by the Sloan Digital ...
Astronomy
May 17, 2024
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36
An international team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to find evidence for an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the universe was only 740 million years ...
Astronomy
May 16, 2024
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65
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are well-known satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, but there are more. It is surrounded by at least 61 within 1.4 million light years (for context the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million ...
Astronomy
May 13, 2024
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74
Just a few months ago, the Colombian mountain peak of Ritacuba Blanco was covered in an unbroken layer of white ice and snow, just as it had been for as long as anyone can remember.
Environment
May 8, 2024
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69
A few weeks ago, a team of engineers carefully extracted ESA's EarthCARE satellite from its protective transport container, initiating a meticulous process of inspection, testing and preparation for its liftoff later this ...
Space Exploration
May 3, 2024
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38
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has explored young stellar objects (YSOs) in an open cluster known as NGC 346. The study, published April 24 on the preprint server arXiv, ...
A new analysis of cloud measurements from outside the coast of California, combined with global satellite measurements, reveals that even aerosol particles as small as 25–30 nanometers may contribute to cloud formation. ...
Earth Sciences
May 1, 2024
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Using the Gemini South telescope a team of astronomers have confirmed for the first time that differences in binary stars' composition can originate from chemical variations in the cloud of stellar material from which they ...
Astronomy
Apr 29, 2024
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98
A cloud is a visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body. A cloud is also a visible mass attracted by gravity, such as masses of material in space called interstellar clouds and nebulae. Clouds are studied in the nephology or cloud physics branch of meteorology.
On Earth the condensing substance is typically water vapor, which forms small droplets or ice crystals, typically 0.01 mm in diameter. When surrounded by billions of other droplets or crystals they become visible as clouds. Dense deep clouds exhibit a high reflectance (70% to 95%) throughout the visible range of wavelengths. They thus appear white, at least from the top. Cloud droplets tend to scatter light efficiently, so that the intensity of the solar radiation decreases with depth into the gases, hence the gray or even sometimes dark appearance at the base. Thin clouds may appear to have acquired the color of their environment or background and clouds illuminated by non-white light, such as during sunrise or sunset, may appear colored accordingly. In the near-infrared range, clouds look darker because the water that constitutes the cloud droplets strongly absorbs solar radiation at those wavelengths.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
