College students confirm long-held prediction about atmospheric gravity waves

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Long-anticipated findings confirm eclipses create a ripple effect in Earth's atmosphere.

Two humans stand on a tarp on a grassy field as they release a large white balloon into the air, the sun glaring behind it as the contrails streak the blue sky above.
Plymouth State University students Sarah Brigandi and Sammantha Boulay release a weather balloon from Moriarty, New Mexico, to collect atmospheric data on Oct. 14, 2023. (Image credit: NASA)

College students' measurements during a "ring of fire" solar eclipse last year have confirmed a long-held prediction about mysterious gravity waves in Earth's atmosphere.The students confirmed the prediction by identifying a signature of the waves in data obtained from the NASA-sponsored Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP) during the annular solar eclipse on Oct. 14, 2023.

New Mexico was the ideal location to connect the dots between the solar eclipse and the creation of atmospheric gravity waves — ripples that occur in Earth's atmosphere. (These should not be confused with gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time first proposed by Albert Einstein.)

Related: NASA balloon observes glowing blue clouds in Earth's upper atmosphere (video)

"New Mexico looked especially promising," Jie Gong, a researcher in the Climate and Radiation Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and co-investigator of the research on atmospheric gravity waves, said in a statement. "The majority of atmospheric gravity sources are convection, weather systems, and mountains. We wanted to eliminate all those possible sources."

Starting the day before the eclipse, the teams worked in shifts to release a balloon every 15 minutes. The instruments aboard each balloon measured the temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed, and location throughout the different levels of Earth's atmosphere. After studying the information closely for months, the teams identified a pattern indicating that atmospheric gravity waves had occurred.

"We put all the data together according to time, and when we plotted that time series, I could already see the stripes in the signal," Gong said. "I bombarded everybody's email. We were quite excited."

The students' discovery could help improve weather forecasting.

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—Megadrought on Earth affected gravity waves at the edge of space

—Why is Earth's weather getting weirder?

—What makes Earth's atmosphere so special? 

"Climate models are complicated, and they make some assumptions about what atmospheric factors to take into account," Angela Des Jardins, director of the Montana Space Grant Consortium, which led the NEBP, said in the statement. "Understanding how the atmosphere reacts in the special case of eclipses helps us better understand the atmosphere, which in turn helps us make more accurate weather predictions and, ultimately, better understand climate change." 

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Meredith Garofalo
Meredith Garofalo
Contributing Writer

Meredith is a regional Murrow award-winning Certified Broadcast Meteorologist and science/space correspondent. She most recently was a Freelance Meteorologist for NY 1 in New York City & the 19 First Alert Weather Team in Cleveland. A self-described "Rocket Girl," Meredith's personal and professional work has drawn recognition over the last decade, including the inaugural Valparaiso University Alumni Association First Decade Achievement Award, two special reports in News 12's Climate Special "Saving Our Shores" that won a Regional Edward R. Murrow Award, multiple Fair Media Council Folio & Press Club of Long Island awards for meteorology & reporting, and a Long Island Business News & NYC TV Week "40 Under 40" Award.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • orsobubu
    the possibilities those signals were hints for gravitational waves are infinitesimal imo, since the serious doubts about ligos experiments with the supposed cosmic waves. One thing is real, instead, are the plenty of chemitrails shown in the article's photo.
    Reply
  • billslugg
    This article was about waves that appear in air due to cooling from an eclipse. LIGO concerns gravity waves. The two have nothing to do with each other. The chemtrails are clouds of burned fuel. Avgas burns to water and CO2. The water condenses into clouds. When 50,000 pounds of fuel burns to 60,000 pounds of water plus CO2, where do you suppose the water is going to go? it makes clouds. This is to be expected.
    Reply
  • Questioner
    'Gravity waves' are compression and tension waves of space-time itself and have nothing directly to do with the mechanics of gravity.
    Reply
  • billslugg
    The expansion and contraction of space is done by moving a large gravitational mass back and forth. Our instruments can only detect very large masses such as neutron stars, moving very quickly, as they do when merging.
    Reply