{"id":4811,"date":"2015-06-22T06:39:43","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T06:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=4811"},"modified":"2015-06-22T06:39:43","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T06:39:43","slug":"night-shining-clouds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/night-shining-clouds\/","title":{"rendered":"Night-Shining Clouds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-4812\" src=\"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg\" alt=\"north_aim_2015160_lrg\" width=\"448\" height=\"299\" title=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg 448w, https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg-300x200.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 448px) 100vw, 448px\" \/><\/a>In the late spring and summer, unusual clouds form high in the atmosphere above the polar regions of the world. As the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere gets coooler, and ice crystals form on meteor dust and other particles high in the sky. The result is noctilucent or \u201cnight-shining\u201d clouds (NLCs)\u2014electric blue wisps that grow on the edge of space.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">NASA\u2019s\u00a0<a style=\"color: #428bca;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/mission_pages\/aim\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(AIM) spacecraft observed\u00a0noctilucent\u00a0clouds on June 10, 2015. This image is a composite of several satellite passes over the Arctic, and the clouds appear in various shades of light blue to white, depending on the density of the ice particles. The instrument measures albedo\u2014how much light is reflected back to space by the high-altitude clouds.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Noctilucent clouds were first described in the mid-19th century after the eruption of the Krakatau volcano. Volcanic ash spread through the atmosphere, making for vivid sunsets around the world and provoking the first known observations of NLCs. At first people thought they were a side-effect of the volcano, but long after Krakatau\u2019s ash settled, the wispy, glowing clouds remained.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">In the past decade, AIM has been observing and measuring these seasonal, high-altitude cloud formations. Researchers have found that they are appearing earlier and stretching to lower latitudes with greater frequency. There is some evidence that this is a result of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Though they were not thick enough to appear in AIM imagery, some noctilucent clouds were visible to ground-based observers in the continental United States on June 9 and 10.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the late spring and summer, unusual clouds form high in the atmosphere above the polar regions of the world. As the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere gets coooler, and ice crystals form on meteor dust and other particles high in the sky. The result is noctilucent or \u201cnight-shining\u201d clouds (NLCs)\u2014electric blue wisps that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4812,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",95,63,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",448,299,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/north_aim_2015160_lrg.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"<a href=\"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/category\/feature\/\" rel=\"category tag\">Feature<\/a>","tag_info":"Feature","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}