WASHINGTON, DC — One million miles from Earth, a NASA camera is capturing unexpected flashes of light reflecting off our planet.
The homeward-facing instrument on NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, launched in 2015, caught hundreds of these flashes over the span of a year. NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) instrument aboard DSCOVR is taking almost-hourly images of the sunlit planet from its spot between Earth and the sun. In a new study, scientists deciphered the tiny cause to the big reflections: high-altitude, horizontally oriented ice crystals.
“The source of the flashes is definitely not on the ground,” said Alexander Marshak, DSCOVR deputy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. “It’s definitely ice, and most likely solar reflection off of horizontally oriented particles.”
Detecting glints like this from much farther away could be used by other spacecraft to study exoplanets, Marshak said. He is now investigating how common these horizontal ice particles are and whether they’re common enough to have a measureable impact on how much sunlight passes through the atmosphere. If so, it’s a feature that could be incorporated into computer models of how much heat is reaching and leaving Earth, he said.
Spotting bright flashes
Marshak first noticed light flashes occasionally appearing over oceans as he looked through daily EPIC images. Investigating them further, Marshak and his colleagues found similar reflections from our pale blue dot caught the attention of astronomer Carl Sagan in 1993. Sagan was looking at images taken by the Galileo spacecraft, which launched in 1989 to study Jupiter and its moons. During one if its gravitational-assist swings around Earth, Galileo turned its instruments on this planet and collected data. Sagan and his colleagues used that to test a key question: whether spacecraft could detect signatures of life from afar.
“Large expanses of blue ocean and apparent coastlines are present, and close examination of the images shows a region of [mirror-like] reflection in ocean but not on land,” they wrote of the glints.
Flashes of light reflected off oceans – like those referenced by Sagan – could have a simple explanation, Marshak said: sunlight hits a smooth part of an ocean or lake, and reflects directly back to the sensor, like taking a flash-picture in a mirror.
But when the scientists took another look at the Galileo images, they saw something Sagan and his colleagues apparently missed – bright flashes of light over land as well. As the contact listed on the website that posts all EPIC images, Marshak started getting emails from people curious about what the flashes were.
“We found quite a few very bright flashes over land as well,” he said. “When I first saw it I thought maybe there was some water there, or a lake the sun reflects off of. But the glint is pretty big, so it wasn’t that.”
Instead, he and his colleagues thought of water elsewhere in the Earth system: ice particles high in the atmosphere. They then conducted a series of experiments to confirm the cause of the distant flashes.
First, they cataloged all prospective sunlight glints over land in images from the EPIC camera and found 866 bursts between DSCOVR’s launch in June 2015 and August 2016.
They reasoned that if these 866 flashes were caused by reflected sunlight, they would be limited to certain spots on the globe – spots where the angle between the sun and Earth is the same as the angle between the spacecraft and Earth. When they plotted the locations of the glints with those angles, given Earth’s tilt and the spacecraft’s location, the two matched.
This helped confirm that it wasn’t something like lightning causing the flashes. “Lightning doesn’t care about the sun and EPIC’s location,” Marshak said.
Another feature of the EPIC data helped confirm that the flashes were from a high altitude, not simply water on the ground. Two channels on the instrument are designed to measure the height of clouds, and when the scientists went to the data they found high cirrus clouds, 5 to 8 kilometers (3 to 5 miles) where the glints were located.
(Via NASA Goddard Spaceflight center)
Kids playing with laser flashlights….
Well, someone has posted comments a few times on this site, regarding the hypothetical potential for water droplets to act as directionally focused mirrors . . ’cause I “discovered” some time ago that they put tiny glass beads in the paint they use for highway lines, since at tiny sizes surface tension ought to dominate so as to form spheres . . Just sayin’ ; )
Spherical droplets would lead to diffuse reflection and extensive bright white reflections like we see in normal cloud.
To get specular reflection would require very tight alignment of flat reflective crystals. This seems pretty improbable but having taken images of such specular reflection of the sum myself and watched it for about an hour, I have to conclude that something like this does happen. I would like an explanation of a possible mechanism.
“Spherical droplets would lead to diffuse reflection and extensive bright white reflections like we see in normal cloud.”
Then why do they put little spheres in paint to make it reflective? (They really do, and I still have some . . they shine back at the light source . . )
Now, those flashes are not the sort of effect I would expect to see from what I’m talking about, but rather more diffuse mist looking stuff, sorta like phantom clouds that would not be visible from other perspectives, (and would be a part of cloud reflection).
“To get specular reflection would require very tight alignment of flat reflective crystals.”
I gotta think magnetic field/polar water molecules . . as a starting point . .
Spheres will reflect back towards the source, and in many other directions. If you covered a large area, you would get a diffused reflection, not a clear image of the car headlights. If you stood at the side of the road as a car went past, you would also see reflected light. It is not the same as the specular reflection we are trying to explain here.
Polarisation, yes. I was thinking maybe electrical since it would not be hard to find conditions with a strong electrical field. maybe impacting UV induces a charge on one side of the ice “platelettes” suggested in the paper. Or maybe causes a very thin layer of liquid water on the surface.
In view of roundness of the images I took, this must be happening at a very specific height, not through out the cloud, other wise the reflected image would be diffuse in the vertical direction. My images only show very slight elongation.
I’m guessing that this is happening at the upper limit of the zone where freezing conditions occur. Radiosounde data closest to my observation indicated several kilometer deep zone where this ice cloud would be forming. yet the images does not blur.
http://weather.uwyo.edu/cgi-bin/sounding?region=europe&TYPE=TEXT%3ALIST&YEAR=2016&MONTH=11&FROM=0312&TO=0500&STNM=03808&ICE=1&REPLOT=1
Greg. a repost of my reply to your 1st post way upthread.:
A tumbling crystal would reflect a sweeping beam which would create a tiny momentary flash to an observer who was viewing from the correct angle. Imagine a shiny coin spinning on a table while being lit by a bright light to the side. People sitting around the table looking at the coin would each see a bright blinking reflection of the lamp. The coin in this example has a vertical axis of rotation.
Long ago I flipped some pennies off of a high bridge. The rate of spinning increased as they fell and each penny produced a reflection of the sun which appeared to brighten as the rotation rate increased. They were easily visible for several seconds as they fell into a deep gorge. I could see the sun reflecting off the flat faces of the pennies as I looked down at them because the axis of rotation of each coin was horizontal and the sun was high.
Now imagine billions of flat ice crystals buoyed by an updraft. Each crystal would tumble around a horizontal axis, sweeping the overhead sky with a reflection of the sun.From a single viewpoint the glint from each crystal would be puny and brief. An observer far above would see a continuous combined glint of millions of crystals as long as the angle of view was right. Such a reflection could be seen from aircraft for many minutes. For a spacecraft in orbit the viewing angle would be correct for only a brief moment. In the video above each flash could be seen to grow to max brightness, then fade rapidly after a brief moment of peak brightness.
in re your point in this post that the image would be stretched out if the reflections involved a cloud of particles: Yes, when viewed from any angle less than directly overhead with the sun behind the camera.
SR
I wouldn’t mind seeing what this satellite sees in August when the solar eclipse happens.
Putin AGAIN !!!
It’s the Russians.
I would venture a comment based on the responses to my recent (thanks AW) guest post on Salby plus those comments here.
There seem to be four types of WUWT commenters:
1. Warmunists who will deny contrary evidence at all costs, thereby digging themselves into deep holes they do not even recognize. Mann blocking Scott Adams is a very recent example.
2. Trolls who just muck things up with straw men and ad homs. They may not even be warmunists, just apparently deranged.
3. True skeptics, who debate, contribute, learn, and progess despite admittedly imperfect knowledge. This post is an excellent example of mostly type 3. Telescope experts, cloud exerts, logic experts, all wrestling with explanations to an observed phenomenon.
4. True D*****s, exemplified by a very few on my very recent Salby theory post.
Lets hope WUWT attracts a preponderance of type 3s. Is what brings me back here so often.
Please accept my apology – just me testing my new, dietary maximized blue-flame technology 🙂
It was me.
I was amazed to see a real spacecraft with real people in it the thing is not from around here from earth they had a emblem on there uniforms it went over my trailer several years back it was a telephone pole high no noise no sound when went over charcoal black .im even willing to take a lie detector test to prove to the world the truth what I seen
sorry, did not mean to cause so much uproar, it was my sunglasses reflecting as I lay with my back down, on the yacht.
How soon will Al Gore be calling for a ban or tax on horizontal Ice crystals in the upper atmosphere?
Why are the signals all toward Alpha Centauri?
They’ve been watching us.
And now they’re coming.
I wonder if they considered the possibility the flashes came from that little light on top of the TARDIS?
There could be multiple sources. Clearly, a lake on cloudless and calm day would reflect a lot of light. Ice crystals in the sky are similar. However, I think the size of the object would need to be very large to show up at a million miles.
“However, I think the size of the object would need to be very large to show up at a million miles”.
Exactly. I’m not much good at this sort of thing, but my GUESS is that with no focusing, the scale of the reflecting “surface” has to be on the order of the diameter of the sun (864,000 miles) times the distance from the observer to the reflecting “surface” (1,000,000 miles) divided by the length of the path from the sun to the observer (93,000,000 miles + 1,000,000 miles). That works out to 919 miles.
In the unlikely event that I have the geometry right, that pretty much rules out lots of things like airplane wings that produce flashes if the observer is only a few tens of miles from the reflector. It also rules out single ice crystals of course. But a large region of similarly oriented ice crystals might work.
Did you notice? All of the reports of flashes from Earth started occurring after the 1960’s! This correlates well with Man-made CO2. Obviously CO2 crystals are causing the flashes, as the frozen CO2 warms up to incredibly high temperatures caused by global warming… This accounts perfectly for the “pause” which was actually frozen CO2 crystal plasma directing global warming at other innocent planets!
I am going to start my PhD thesis on this and get a degree in Climate Science.
But sarcasm aside, its kind of cool that Earth sparkles.
It’s clear that this is visual evidence of the military’s manipulation of the the Ionosphere with one of the various HAARP arrays. All of this other nonsense is simply part of the cover-up.
No it isn’t clear proof of anything. If you think it is, you are willing to see “proof” of your preconceived beliefs in anything that is unexplained. This is the same mental process which leads to AGW hysteria.
Ristvan leaves out one group of commenters – those happy to spot some irregularity and make a joke of it. DrKarlStalin May 15, 2017 at 4:13 pm is a prize example – and of course there are the pedants!
However, way back in the 60s (IIRC) bright flashes in the South Atlantic were interpreted as being from South African atomic bomb tests. Wonder what happened to that theory? South Africa’s nuclear arsenal seems to have gone the same way as Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the dreaded WMD in Iraq.
IIRC, South Africa (probably) destroyed their nuclear weapons in the early 1990s. Israel doesn’t admit to having nuclear weapons but is thought to have developed them in the 1960s and to have 80-400 of them. See Wikipedia.
NASA says “spots where the angle between the sun and Earth is the same as the angle between the spacecraft and Earth.” Where is the vertex for the angles? A pair of points doesn’t make an angle.
Technically you are correct, it poorly written. The missing info is the local horizontal plane of the postulated flat horizontal crystals.
Yeah, horizontal ice crystals — sure.
Have you seen my 120-acre marine mirrors?
It does sound improbable and my original reaction would be the same. But now look at the images I posted above of similar reflections from ice cloud taken from a commercial flight over England.
Unlikely as it seems there is something creating a specular reflected image of the sun. One possible explanation would be well oriented flat ice crystals.
As Sherlock Holmes said: once you have eliminated all possible explanations, all that remains are the impossible ones.
Maybe you can suggest another cause for my observations.
robert_g May 15, 2017 at 2:11 pm
“Because flat ice” ?!
Unfortunately that does not explain anything since it does not account for the improbable situation where all the crystals are closely aligned. This is typical scientific smart-arsery where they claim everything is understood but the “don’t fully understand” what is happening.
Giving something a name like sub-sun does not mean you have explained the phenomenon.
In fact this is the same problem as the NASA article. They claim it is flat ice but do not say why that ice is aligned. This is highly unlikely and needs explanation and proof that it even happens ( beyond citing the thing you are trying to explain as “proof” that it happens).
This is obviously just Goku powering up, duh.
it looks interesting
Space trash. Planet ghetto
T H A N K S
F O R
T H E
F I S H
From the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, 16N latitude one day, late afternoon… a cyclonic grey raincloud mass all around us that blocked the sky to the horizon… EXCEPT for a clear large semicircular center directly overhead, which we call a “sleepy hurricane”… and through it was revealed a Noctilucent layer so still with sun angle so precisely prismatic… that there were brightly vivid irregularly shaped patches every color of the rainbow. For 5-10 minutes, all of the illumination around us came from that rainbow. People literally pulled their automobiles off the road to get out, to gaze in wonder. There were tears in peoples’ eyes.
Now THAT was no brief reflective flash of coherent light from a fast-moving vantage point in space. To see this show, you have to be along for the ride.
Did any one of the scientists bother to correlate flight paths of shiny aeroplanes at the time of these images? Big bird lots of reflection area, satellites going over at night reflect the sunlight on iridium panels as a flash when they turn to reflect sunlight. Planes upper wings and fuselage are much bigger panels that also reflect in daylight skies. Ice crystals are much smaller.