We need to understand how our own atmosphere works if we are to look for similar atmospheric conditions around other planets. Also, we keep talking about this pesky climate change concern, greenhouse gases, and what the future holds if we don’t cool things down. While we have a lot of info about what is going on near the surface of Earth, the upper atmosphere is difficult to understand since the water vapor in the air distorts any data taken, and space instruments haven’t been able to make direct measurements. Additionally, a lot of the data already collected during other observations has been considered noise and discarded. So while climate models predict that temperatures in the upper atmosphere will decrease due to greenhouse gases, scientists were unable to test out their models in reality. 

Now, thanks to the SOFIA airborne telescope, we can directly measure the atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere, and the results match all those snippets of direct measurements from rocket and Space Shuttle instruments as well as the indirect satellite measurements. The confirmation results were published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment using data collected in 2015 during the same flight that observed the Jellyfish nebula we talked about recently. Researchers intend to apply similar analytical methods to data taken during other flights and in different seasons to see just how the atomic oxygen amounts change with location and time.

More Information

NASA press release

SOFIA press release

“Direct measurements of atomic oxygen in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere using terahertz heterodyne spectroscopy,” Heiko Richter et al., 2021 January 26, Nature Communications Earth & Environment