Cornell Fluid
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Dynamics Seminar
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The Remarkable Properties of the Upper Atmosphere:
A Minor’s Canary of Global Change, a detector of major earthquakes 40
minutes before they occur and other characteristics with less human impact
but still very interesting scientifically.
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Michael C. Kelley
James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professor of Engineering Emeritus
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University
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Tuesday, January 27, 2015 12 pm
178 Rhodes Hall
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The upper atmosphere has remarkable properties, many of which have societal impact. The following list
details some of the more exciting aspects, which will be discussed in this presentation.
1. The summer polar mesosphere is the coldest atmospheric layer inside the orbit of Jupiter, as low
as 100K in full solar illumination, and where the highest clouds on earth form – noctilucent
clouds (NLC) at 90 km.
2. Naked eye visible meteor trails have the same features that Professor Williamson of MAE has
reproduced in his Upson Hall Lab. And such meteor can be heard at the same time they are seen.
3. An NLC of remarkable character, the brightest NLC ever seen over England, was seen one day
after the Tunguska event in Siberia, which released energy equivalent to more than ten Hiroshima
class bombs: part of the evidence which led Kelley et al.(2009) to conclude that there is definitive
evidence that the impactor was a comet, not a meteorite.
4. Due to its tenuous nature the mesosphere acts as a “minor’s canary” for atmospheric change.
5. The entire region above the mesopause has properties similar to the Martian atmosphere, in
particular, due to the absence of thermal inertia diurnal tides course across the region at huge
velocities approaching the speed of sound.
6. Lee waves occur in both places, in the Martian case, due to winds blowing across crater rims and,
in the Earth’s case, winds blowing over the Andes have been shown to create lee waves stable for
at least a month and extending to over 300 km.
7. Studies of the Tunguska cloud and the plume of the Space Shuttle indicate that the region is two
dimensionally turbulent as is the flow at the base of the deep ocean and the polar ionosphere
when the interplanetary magnetic field as a component parallel to the Earth’s dipole axis. This
hypothesis (Kelley et al., 2009) if verified will completely change the paradigm for winds in the
upper atmosphere.
8. Strong evidence exists that the tenuous main ionospheric layer begins to react in a characteristic
manner 40 minutes before major quakes (Heki, 2009), which Kelley et al., (2014) explain as due
to an electromagnetic field building up before a quake and which maps to the ionosphere, causing
the layer to rise in some areas and fall in others creating apparent increases and decreases of the
slant total electron content (TEC) easily measured using the fleet of GPS sources and the
thousands of receiving stations on the ground.