When Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern United States last month, it caused widespread power outages and devastating flooding locally. But as new NOAA data shows, the superstorm also sent shock waves through Earth’s atmosphere.
The Atmospheric Wave Experiment (or AWE) aboard the International Space Station captured images of Hurricane Helene’s gravitational waves, demonstrating both the instrument’s capabilities and the hurricane’s intensity.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the air that cause many of Earth’s natural and often violent phenomena. Everything from thunderstorms and tornadoes to tsunamis and volcanoes can generate atmospheric waves, and studying the atmosphere’s gravitational waves can help scientists determine the effects of Earth’s weather on space weather, which requires instruments in low Earth orbit and can disrupt communications outside.
Hurricane Helene provided an ideal opportunity to interrogate AWE’s ability to detect atmospheric gravitational waves. The hurricane crashed into Florida’s Big Bend in late September as a Category 4 storm with winds exceeding 140 miles per hour. Helene knocked out power to millions of people in the southeastern United States and devastated inland areas with flooding, especially in parts of Tennessee and western North Carolina. Satellite images released in the immediate aftermath of the storm revealed the communities that lost power and the intense lightning from the storm from the air.
The recently released data shows that the hurricane generated gravitational waves high in the atmosphere, well above the storm clouds. To be clear: gravitational waves are not same as gravitational wavesdistortions in spacetime measured by interferometers and pulsar timing arrays. Gravitational waves do pass through the Earth (and everything on it, including you and me), but they are much more subtle than ripples in the atmosphere and are generated by sources are much, much bigger than hurricanes.
The waves are artificially colored in the data – shown below – red, yellow and green, to represent the differences in infrared wavelength radiation produced by airglow in Earth’s mesosphere, the layer of the planet’s atmosphere that extends for 31 to 53 miles (50 to 85 miles). km) above the surface. The AWE images of gravitational waves are some of the first publicly released images from the instrument, which was launched last November and mounted on the International Space Station. The images confirm AWE’s ability to study how hurricanes affect Earth’s atmosphere.
“Like rings of water spreading from a droplet in a pond, we see circular Helene waves surging westward from the northwest coast of Florida,” said Ludger Scherliess, principal investigator of AWE at Utah State University, in a NASA study. edition.
Natural disasters have devastating consequences, many of which are clearly visible. But they also produce some under-the-radar effects. For example, the massive 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption produced a type of air pressure wave that was theorized in 1937 but has not been proven to exist. until two years ago. Last week, a team of researchers discovered that the eruption was preceded by a previously unnoticed seismic waves which was detected at stations hundreds of miles away, a reminder that emergency preparedness systems can be even better prepared for these catastrophic events.
Even ordinary thunderstorms – that is, not just the extreme weather associated with hurricanes and volcanic eruptions – are harbor secrets. Last month, a team of scientists discovered that thunderstorms in the tropics a newly identified type of gamma raysproviding a possible link between glows and flashes associated with the storms.