The height of the ionosphere/space transition is controlled in part by the amount of extreme ultraviolet energy emitted by the Sun and a somewhat contracted ionosphere could have been expected because C/NOFS was launched during a minimum in the 11-year cycle of solar activity. However, the size of the actual contraction caught investigators by surprise. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)
ScienceDaily (Dec. 16, 2008) — Observations made by NASA instruments onboard an Air Force satellite have shown that the boundary between the Earth’s upper atmosphere and space has moved to extraordinarily low altitudes. These observations were made by the Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation (CINDI) instrument suite, which was launched aboard the U.S. Air Force’s Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite on April 16, 2008.
The CINDI suite, which was built under the direction Principal Investigator Rod Heelis of the University of Texas at Dallas, includes both ion and neutral sensors and makes measurements of the variations in neutral and ion densities and drifts.
CINDI and C/NOFS were designed to study disturbances in Earth’s ionosphere that can result in a disruption of navigation and communication signals. The ionosphere is a gaseous envelope of electrically charged particles that surrounds our planet and it is important because Radar, radio waves, and global positioning system signals can be disrupted by ionospheric disturbances.
CINDI’s first discovery was, however, that the ionosphere was not where it had been expected to be. During the first months of CINDI operations the transition between the ionosphere and space was found to be at about 260 miles (420 km) altitude during the nighttime, barely rising above 500 miles (800 km) during the day. These altitudes were extraordinarily low compared with the more typical values of 400 miles (640 km) during the nighttime and 600 miles (960 km) during the day.
(h/t to Dan Lee)
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I guess this means the tool bag will stay in orbit a few months longer than anticipated.
Basil, just a slight correction to your post. UAH and RSS showed a slight increase in the temperature anomaly, not the temperature. November was still colder than October.
Warm things expand, Cool things contract.. hmmm dont suppose it could be explained that easily?
Pamela,
Atmospheric thinning: A worthwhile thought. My amateur solar heating model (not a simple curve fit) indicated a strong correlation (with a physically explained lag) between sunspots and temperatures over the last 150+ years. But, measured fluctuations in actual energy reaching earth were not sufficient to explain all the effect according to scientists. So, I am interested in other potential heating-cooling mechanisms related to sunspot cycles. Maybe this “atmospheric blanket” thinning you describe is a candidate to explain one of the physical processes involved.
Ed Scott, fear-mongering and misstating reality are not useful. The 3T tons of ice are not gone and didn’t melt. You must have missed the article that showed the ice level worldwide is trending flat or slightly up.
Space, the final frontier… now just that little bit closer.
Seriously though, could these simply be normal conditions for a Grand Minimum (if that’s indeed where we’re heading)? We didn’t have satellites during the LIA, after all, so we could be in previously uncharted territory, so to speak.
Well these “ionospheric layers” are a long way above the very thin atmospheric layer that is Ozone, so one would expect to find pretty near the full complement of solar UV still there. I don’t have handy a recent solar specrum based on satellite observations, but the very well known and oft republished graph of Valley in 1965, shows the extraterrestrial solar spectrum as fairly closely fitting a 5900K black body radiation curve. The better books generally quote two different temperatures for the effective blackbody temperature of the sun. The 5900 K temperature I believe is the temperature that gives the best spectral fit to the blackbody curve. A slightly different temperature gives the best match to the earth received value of the solar constant. (no I don’t hve that number handy).
The problem is of course, that the sun is not an isothermal body at a single temperature. In particular, the coronal regions of the sun have temperatures up to a million K, which produces energy at much shorter wavelengths that a 6K black body. Other surface phenomena yield different temperatures which create bumps here and there so the shape is not exact BB shape.
In particular, the sun exhibits an “anomalous glitch that peaks above the 5900 K BB curve at around 450 nm (which is similar to the Blue LED color. The glitch sticks up about 10% higher than the BB peak at around 500nm. Shorter than 400 nm, the deviation from the BB curve is quite pronounced; but in the direction of undershooting the 5900K BB curve.
So the upper atmosphere gets hit by all kinds of hot photons.
The Einstein E x lambda product is 1.2398 electron Volts, so a 0.5 micron green photon is about 2.48 eV, and the solar spectrum peters out at about 0.2 microns, which is about 6.2 eV. I don’t remember what the ionisation potentials are for any ordinary gases any more particularly O2 and N2, but I imagine that there’s plenty of photon energy to create all thoise plasma ions in the ionosphere.
If you look at the ground level solar spectrum, the peak is knocked down by at least 25% all the way out to about 0.62 microns in the red region, and the culprit is Ozone, and Oxygen (mostly Ozone), so the O3 which is supposed to protect us from skin cancer, also is responsible for keeping the ground cooler, by eliminating a big chunk of the strongest sunlight. But Ozone also absorbs strongly in the 9-10 micron range, so it acts as a GHG gas in that range, having the greatest effect over the hottest regions of the globe.
In addition to the hot photons, you also have the solar charged particles and cosmic ray primaries which probably create some of the ionosphere layer’s plasma.
I’m sure there are climate effects that result from movement of the ionosphere layers; but I don’t have the foggiest idea what they would be.
“However, the size of the actual contraction caught investigators by surprise.”
How could that be? Don’t scientists know everything there is to know about our atmosphere and any possible contributions/interactions with the sun? Isn’t the science settled? Golly jeepers!
pkatt…i was thinking the same thing!
pkatt (10:26:47) : “Warm things expand, Cool things contract.. hmmm dont suppose it could be explained that easily?”
No, that’s why the days are longer in the summer and shorter in the winter.
Is this “thickness” homogeneous around the globe or does it depend on seasons too, or just on the sun’s activity?
To Pamela Grey.
Hi Pamela; are you some kind of official ‘sun-worshipper’ ?
I am becoming increasingly non-plussed by how many alleged “climatologists” seem to know damn near nothing about the sun; as if it is just an aberraration in their Playstation models.
Don’t have to reveal any State secrets; but you seem to know your sun .
George
pkatt (10:26:47) :
Warm things expand, Cool things contract.. hmmm dont suppose it could be explained that easily?
Yes, this is close to the correct explanation, at solar maximum the upper [way upper?] atmosphere heats up and expands.
pkatt. Except water.
“Observations made by NASA instruments onboard an Air Force satellite have shown that the boundary between the Earth’s upper atmosphere and space has moved to extraordinarily low altitudes. These observations were made by the Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation (CINDI) instrument suite, which was launched aboard the U.S. Air Force’s Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite on April 16, 2008.”
The time span over which these measurements have been made is hardly adequate to establish that this an anomaly and not an un-remarkable cyclical occurrence. Scientists are always surprised at discovering unknown facts about the planet, Earth.
“The ionosphere is a gaseous envelope of electrically charged particles that surrounds our planet and it is important because Radar, radio waves, and global positioning system signals can be disrupted by ionospheric disturbances.”
How has this affected other observations using Radar, radio waves, and global positioning system signals, the measurement of sea level, for instance.
Scientists should always expect the unknown when investigating the unknown. What is the point of investigating the known?
Lawyers call it the ‘weight of evidence’. Scientists refer to ‘parsimony’. Sherlock Holmes said that when you eliminate every explanation which is impossible , whatever explanation remains, no matter how implausible (or unpopular) is correct. William of Occam (Ockam, Hockam, as you will) said something else like this while he was shaving 😉
All lines of evidence are … well.. lining up. It all coheres and the data trends have a pretty damned straight trajectory that points directly at, surprise, the sun. Who would have guessed that the same energy source which makes for the differences in temperatures between day and night, winter and summer also plays the major role in longer term temprature cycles?
I’m going home and turning up the heat ’cause it’s cold here in the east, too.
Tom
Related:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=27189
See what GOre started: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/697386/nationwide-protests-against-climate-plan/?rss=yes
(1) the ionosphere is lower
(2) this is bad, very bad
(3) we don’t yet know the reason for the lowering, but we will soon learn that it is caused by something that normal humans like or need to do.
pkatt:
yes.
Natural variation!
Keith,
Thanks for the correction. I was a bit sloppy in the way I wrote.
Basil
OT – but did anyone see this.
“Study-Climate change may force skiers uphill”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/28251193
There is a suggestion that the resorts (Aspen/Park City) should be in good shape for the next 25 years but the long term trend is that there will be “there will be less snowpack — or no snow at all — at the base areas, and the season will be shorter because snow will accumulate later and melt earlier.”
I wonder if the AGW crowd is already starting to shift to an understanding of a negative PDO and hedge their bets?
Ravishal Bentham (08:51:49) :
I assume they are mostly referring to the F1 and F2 layers of the ionosphere. Have ham radio operators noticed this lowering while using the HF Spectrum? (3-30 Megahertz)
See: http://www.solarcycle24.com VE3EN runs it. They have a 6m tools section that ought to answer your question (along with a nifty summary of solar status from other sites and great pictures…)
Could this ionospheric altitude be used as a highly sensitive measure of solar cycle and consequently of Svensmark’s cosmoclimatology?
If so, there may be a strong correlation between the ionospheric altitude and cloud variation. These in turn would be a leading (“differential”) signal for global temperature change.
Off Topic
Hows this for a headline?
Last decade is the warmest on record, scientists say ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/3794475/Last-decade-is-the-warmest-on-record-scientists-say.html )