\n Media contact:<\/strong> Brittany Steff, bsteff@purdue.edu<\/a> <\/p>\n <\/div>\n Note to journalists:<\/p>\n \n Photos of Dan Cziczo and the ER-2, as well as a photo of an overshooting top are available on Google Drive<\/a>. A video of Cziczo explaining the research can be found at this link<\/a>. <\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. \u2014 Gully warsher. Duck drownder. Toad strangler. Cob floater. Sod soaker. Whatever their names, summer in the Midwest isn\u2019t summer without strong, sudden storms with towering clouds. While the Indian subcontinent is famous for its monsoon season,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":17786,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,524],"tags":[],"department":[32],"source":[29],"purdue_today_topic":[],"coauthors":[77],"class_list":["post-17897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-space","department-science","source-purdue-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17897"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17981,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17897\/revisions\/17981"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17897"},{"taxonomy":"department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=17897"},{"taxonomy":"source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/source?post=17897"},{"taxonomy":"purdue_today_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/purdue_today_topic?post=17897"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=17897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u201cIn the summer, here in the Midwest particularly, we get all these air quality warnings from wildfires because the climate is getting warmer and the land is getting drier,\u201d Cziczo said. \u201cThat\u2019s becoming more common, but that\u2019s all close to the planet\u2019s surface, where we thought it was staying. We flew this research aircraft up into the stratosphere, the next layer up of the atmosphere, which should be separate. Stratosphere means stratified; it should be separate. But what we found is that during these big wildfire seasons, the lower part of the stratosphere is just littered with these biomass particles.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A rent in the vault of heaven<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Cziczo and his team study the mechanics of the atmosphere, especially how, why, when and where clouds and storms form. They are especially interested in the way that warm, wet air moves up from the Gulf of Mexico, crashes against the Rocky Mountains and forms severe summer storms and rain, much like summer monsoon in India forms when warm, wet winds collide with the Himalayas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Big storms and clouds typically can\u2019t expand beyond the layer of pressure and wind that marks the change between the troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere closest to the ground, and the stratosphere \u2014 it\u2019s why so many clouds look like buttes or mesas with flat tops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that\u2019s not always true. Like a titan punching up through the cloud layer, the top of the storm can become too powerful to be contained and erupt into the stratosphere itself in a formation called an overshooting top. It is a fountain of cloud, a geyser of storm that erupts into the peaceful protective layer of the stratosphere. As it gushes up, it brings with it a burst of air, along with currents of aerosol, and anything in the air below it \u2014 including pollutants, aerosols and burning biomass.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Earth\u2019s atmosphere is the sheer bubble that protects of our planet like a snow globe. The stratosphere is the realm of the ozone layer, the buffer that absorbs so much of the sun\u2019s radiation and helps keep Earth from turning into a Venusian hothouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Typically, the only particles that make it up into the stratosphere come from rare, globally notable and dramatic events \u2014 violent volcanoes and massive meteors. The incursions scientists found in this study aren\u2019t necessarily chinks in the planet\u2019s armor \u2014 yet. But they might be microfractures. And scientists aren\u2019t sure yet what kind of effects these alterations might have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis could be a really big deal for a number of reasons,\u201d Cziczo said. \u201cFor one thing, for so long, we\u2019ve assumed the stratosphere is a pristine area. But what this shows is that human impacts through a changing climate can affect the chemistry and the radiative ability of the stratosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These particles can interact with sunlight and heat up, warm the stratosphere. It could affect its stability \u2014 which is vital to the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not just the summer storms, either. Sometimes the wildfires themselves get so large that they create their own weather \u2014 directly generating their own storm clouds, called pyrocumulus<\/a>, so strong that they catapult their own burning ash and biomass directly into the stratosphere above the fire. Cziczo notes that they observed this in the fires over Australia in the 2019 bush fire season, but that, as storm season warms, dries and increases in severity, this effect is becoming more frequent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere are actually two ways for this stratosphere puncture to happen,\u201d Cziczo said. \u201cIt can be the one severe fire, but it can also be a bunch of little fires that are just constantly perturbing the stratosphere in a way that we didn\u2019t recognize before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The stratosphere is a high and lonely place \u2014 usually the domain only of military aircraft, weather and research balloons, the grounded Concorde, and spacecraft passing through on their way up or down, as well as a few remarkable weather phenomena including red sprites and blue jet lightning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To study it, NASA built a variant of the Lockheed Martin U-2 aircraft \u2014 dubbed ER-2 for Earth Resources 2<\/a>. Equipped to sniff out aerosols, particles, and shifts in pressure, temperature, humidity and wind rather than adversarial forces and resources, the plane can reach altitudes of 70,000 feet \u2014 higher than 95% of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere with an effective horizon of 300 miles. (In comparison, the reduced gravity aircraft \u2014 also called \u201cvomit comets\u201d \u2014 which frequently help train astronauts and conduct low-gravity science experiments, only reach altitudes of about 35,000 feet.)<\/p>\n\n\n Those two planes are based in California at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, and the storms were happening in the Midwest, prompting one to temporarily transfer to Kansas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat\u2019s kind of interesting about this, and this is one of these things that I\u2019m not sure that everybody knows about, is that North America has a monsoon,\u201d Cziczo said. \u201cMost of us have heard about the Asian monsoon over the Indian subcontinent; these powerful storms that crash up against the Himalayas and drop all this rain. The Midwest has something analogous to that, and it is called the North American monsoon. Warm, wet air from the Gulf of Mexico comes up and gets hung up on the Rockies. That\u2019s what creates a lot of those powerful thunderstorms over the Midwest and through the Great Plains area. That\u2019s why we wanted to be in Kansas during the summertime; you can reach all these different systems from there. We flew up into Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Upper Midwest, Great Plains and all over. I think we even got as far as Texas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ER-2, which has been active since the 1980s, is equipped to measure minute changes in air quality and chemistry, allowing Cziczo and his team to track the footprints of the summer storms and fires through the stratosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cUsing these very sophisticated tools, we were able to tell that it\u2019s not that we\u2019re just throwing a bunch of tropospheric air and putting it in the stratosphere,\u201d Cziczo said. \u201cPutting this particulate matter in the stratosphere changes the dynamics; it changes the chemistry, and it changes the way that part of the atmosphere works. It changes the way it handles heat \u2014 it heats it up faster. And that\u2019s what we\u2019re worried about. That\u2019s what we really need to investigate, to understand. We went to all this trouble to save the ozone layer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This research was funded by NASA\u2019s Earth Science Project Office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 106,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 57,000 at our main campus locations in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue\u2019s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap \u2014 including its integrated, comprehensive Indianapolis urban expansion; the Mitch Daniels School of Business; Purdue Computes; and the One Health initiative \u2014 at https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/president\/strategic-initiatives<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\nUp and away into the wild blue yonder<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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About Purdue University<\/h2>\n\n\n\n