George Miley of U Illinois, Champaign is involved.It will be interesting if anything comes of it.
I am passing this on after a cursory review. It was published yesterday. Please give it 5 minutes before you give up. The speed of light bit in the beginning was off putting for me. But it gets explained better later. The equations at first glance are compelling. They are better covered in the second 5 minutes. I'm going to review it more carefully with multiple stops to get a better feel. This is rapid fire and not typical lecture speed.
I'm more at home with engineering but I am at least conversant with all the material presented. I have also introduced the video to Lubos Motl to see what he thinks.
Muons
Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and led by scientists from the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), this remarkable study shows how the number of high-energy cosmic-rays reaching a detector deep underground, closely matches temperature measurements in the upper atmosphere (known as the stratosphere). For the first time, scientists have shown how this relationship can be used to identify weather events that occur very suddenly in the stratosphere during the Northern Hemisphere winter. These events can have a significant effect on the severity of winters we experience, and also on the amount of ozone over the poles - being able to identify them and understand their frequency is crucial for informing our current climate and weather-forecasting models to improve predictions.Of course if you can measure the events in real time you have a better chance of finding out what causes them. And that means we might learn some things about climate that are not yet in the climate models. Which because they include all the known data can predict what the climate will be like in a century. Except for the fact that there are a lot of known unknowns that the models leave out. Like the effect of Ultraviolet Radiation
Working in collaboration with a major U.S.-led particle physics experiment called MINOS (managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory), the scientists analysed a four-year record of cosmic-ray data detected in a disused iron-mine in the U.S. state of Minnesota. What they observed was a strikingly close relationship between the cosmic-rays and stratospheric temperature - this they could understand: the cosmic-rays, known as muons are produced following the decay of other cosmic rays, known as mesons. Increasing the temperature of the atmosphere expands the atmosphere so that fewer mesons are destroyed on impact with air, leaving more to decay naturally to muons. Consequently, if temperature increases so does the number of muons detected.
What did surprise the scientists, however, were the intermittent and sudden increases observed in the levels of muons during the winter months. These jumps in the data occurred over just a few days. On investigation, they found these changes coincided with very sudden increases in the temperature of the stratosphere (by up to 40 oC in places!). Looking more closely at supporting meteorological data, they realised they were observing a major weather event, known as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming. On average, these occur every other year and are notoriously unpredictable. This study has shown, for the first time, that cosmic-ray data can be used effectively to identify these events.
on the atmosphere. And then there are the unknown unknowns. Oh well. I think I can confidently predict what will be found. Man made CO2 is definitely causing global warming because that is the consensus.
Posts
All Comments
. I can use the money - well actually I will use the proceeds to buy something from Amazon. I get a better deal that way.
