Giant laser to measure luminous clouds

Giant lasers, clouds that mysteriously glow – all the hallmarks of an intriguing lighting story I picked up over the weekend on the ABC website.

Luminous clouds are being measured by a giant laser to assess the extent of climate change on high altitude cloud formations.

The lasers are being pointed at the sky above Davis Station in Antarctica to measure clouds up to 100km above earth.  Scientists say those clouds are more easily seen as the world warms up.

Researchers say “Our atmospheric dynamics are such that as we’ve got a warming troposphere – which is where we live – as that warms that in fact is interlinked with a phenomenon called global cooling up in the mesosphere above 50 kilometres”.

“And so we expect that with a cooler mesosphere we’ll see an increased occurrence of these clouds.”

The clouds are a bright blue colour and their common name is luminous clouds.

I checked out the NASA web site and found not only a cool picture of what these clouds look like but also a handy diagram explaining how they are formed.  To the lighting geeks out there, enjoy…

Luminous clouds (image courtesy NASA)

And how they are formed (again, thanks NASA)