TOPICS:Atmospheric ScienceClimate ChangeNASANASA Goddard Space Flight CenterNoctilucent Clouds

ByLINA TRAN, NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTERJULY 4, 2021

These AIM images span June 6-June 18, 2021, when the Northern Hemisphere noctilucent cloud season was well underway. The colors — from dark blue to light blue and bright white — indicate the clouds’ albedo, which refers to the amount of light that a surface reflects compared to the total sunlight that falls upon it. Things that have a high albedo are bright and reflect a lot of light. Things that don’t reflect much light have a low albedo, and they are dark. Credit: NASA/HU/VT/CU-LASP/AIM/Joy Ng

Since the mesosphere is much thinner than the part of the atmosphere we live in, the impacts of increasing greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, differ from the warming we experience at the surface. One researcher compared where we live, the troposphere…