[/caption]
Well, not the sky exactly, but definitely in the clouds!
This image, acquired by NASA’s Aqua satellite on June 5, shows an enormous oval hole in the clouds above the southern Pacific Ocean, approximately 500 miles (800 km) off the southwestern coast of Tasmania. The hole itself is several hundred miles across, and is the result of high pressure air in the upper atmosphere.
According to Rob Gutro of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, “This is a good visible example of how upper-level atmospheric features affect the lower atmosphere, because the cloud hole is right under the center of a strong area of high pressure. High pressure forces air down to the surface blocking cloud formation. In addition, the altocumulus clouds are rotating counter-clockwise around the hole, which in the southern hemisphere indicates high pressure.”
The northwestern tip of Tasmania and King Island can be seen in the upper right of the image.
The Aqua mission is a part of the NASA-centered international Earth Observing System (EOS). Launched on May 4, 2002, Aqua has six Earth-observing instruments on board, collecting a variety of global data sets about the Earth’s water cycle. Read more about Aqua here.
Untangling what happened in our Solar System tens or hundreds of millions of years ago…
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Apollo astronauts set up a collection of lunar seismometers…
The dwarf planet Ceres has some permanently dark craters that hold ice. Astronomers thought the…
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles accelerated to extreme velocities approaching the speed of light. It…
NASA is in the business of launching things into orbit. But what goes up must…
A new theory suggests that Titan's majestic dune fields may have come from outer space.…