Punching Holes in the Sky

Scientists, photographers and amateur cloud watchers have been looking up with wonderment and puzzlement at "hole punch" clouds for decades. Giant, open spaces appear in otherwise continuous cloud cover, presenting beautiful shapes but also an opportunity for scientific investigation. A new paper published last week in Science inquires into how the holes get punched – airplanes are the culprit – and into the potential for the phenomenon's link to increased precipitation around major airports.

"It appears to be a rather widespread effect for aircraft to inadvertently cause some measureable amount of rain or snow as they fly through certain clouds," said lead author Andrew Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Co. "This is not necessarily enough precipitation to affect global climate, but it is likely to be noticeable around major airports in the midlatitudes."

NASA Langley Research Center cloud specialist Patrick Minnis was one of the co-authors on the paper. NASA satellites Aqua, Terra, CALIPSO and CloudSat were used in the analysis. The research was also partly funded by NASA grants.

NASA Langley Selects Maryland Company For Information Tech Support

NASA has selected Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies of Greenbelt, Md., to provide the agency's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., with computing support services for complex information technology (IT) systems and applications. The five-year maximum value of the Langley Research Center Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES) task order contract is $183 million. The systems supported include unique and high-end systems used by mission and mission-support staff at Langley. LITES provides a wide range of support functions including those for non-standard operating systems, for system interfaces, or for use within a dynamic environment such as a research laboratory or test facility.

LITES provides integrated support that encompasses all activities necessary to develop, deploy, upgrade, operate and maintain a system that delivers an IT capability for research and development use and for business systems and applications. The contract provides support through Langley's Office of the Chief Information Officer in the areas of science and engineering applications; project management applications; business management applications; and center infrastructure applications and data center support not provided as part of NASA’s Information Technology Infrastructure Improvement Program.

Researchers Witness Overnight Breakup, Retreat of Greenland Glacier

NASA-funded researchers monitoring Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier report that a 7 square kilometer (2.7 square mile) section of the glacier broke up on July 6 and 7, as shown in the image above. The calving front – where the ice sheet meets the ocean – retreated nearly 1.5 kilometers (a mile) in one day and is now further inland than at any time previously observed. The chunk of lost ice is roughly one-eighth the size of Manhattan Island, New York.

Research teams led by Ian Howat of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University and Paul Morin, director of the Antarctic Geospatial Information Center at the University of Minnesota have been monitoring satellite images for changes in the Greenland ice sheet and its outlet glaciers. While this week's breakup itself is not unusual, Howat noted, detecting it within hours and at such fine detail is a new phenomenon for scientists.

"While there have been ice breakouts of this magnitude from Jakonbshavn and other glaciers in the past, this event is unusual because it occurs on the heels of a warm winter that saw no sea ice form in the surrounding bay," said Thomas Wagner, cryospheric program scientist at NASA Headquarters. "While the exact relationship between these events is being determined, it lends credence to the theory that warming of the oceans is responsible for the ice loss observed throughout Greenland and Antarctica."