July 1, 2022: Something unexpected just happened in the mesosphere. As June came to an end, NASA’s AIM spacecraft detected a sharp increase in the frequency of noctilucent clouds (NLCs), the most in 15 years:
“In the last couple of days we saw a huge spike in the clouds,” says Cora Randall, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Randall works with AIM data and she prepared the plot, above.
NLCs are Earth’s highest clouds. Seeded by meteoroids, they float at the edge of space more than 80 km above the ground. NLCs form when summertime wisps of water vapor rise up to the mesosphere, allowing water to crystallize around specks of meteor smoke.
Oliver Schwenn witnessed the outbreak on June 30th from Aarhus, Denmark:
“I photographed the display shortly before midnight,” says Schwenn. “The clouds were shining brightly in the night sky.”
What’s causing this? It…
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