Traveling to Chile, researchers from the University of Idaho went to witness an eclipse and its effects on gravity waves and the atmosphere.
The researchers, alongside three other universities in Idaho, have been working with Nasa, Space Grant students and Idaho Space Grant Consortium, to make solar discoveries about the Earth’s atmosphere.
“The Space Grant itself funds research activities around the state of Idaho,” Matthew Bernards, Nasa Idaho Space Grant Consortium Director, said. “We have five, we refer to them as proven Idaho programs, there are two at Boise State University, one at the College of Southern Idaho, one at Idaho State University and one here at the University of Idaho, that do various STEM related activities.”
The grant also funds K-12 schools and educational projects on a competitive basis each year. It also helps students in Idaho conduct internships at Nasa research centers.
“All of that ties into the Chile project because the Idaho Space Grant Consortium funded seven student interns,” Bernards said. “Last summer, (students) who were interested in joining me on a National Science Foundation funded field campaign with Chile.”
In Chile, Bernards and his team traveled to replicate research done with their collaborators in Montana that took place in South America in 2019, who were the first to demonstrate the occurrence of an eclipse that generated its own atmospheric gravity waves.
“Gravity waves are waves in the air that are pretty similar to waves you might see on the ocean,” Malachi Ravkin-Mooney, a researcher on the project, said. “You can imagine, there’s air moving around in the atmosphere, and quite often, it starts bouncing up and down, or oscillating. They’re important because we factor them into our weather prediction models and our climate prediction models.”
To measure these waves, they used a weather balloon that floats up to 100,000 feet in the air. That’s where the oscillations can be measured, and the team can extract information from the waves to get data.
Alex Chambers, an undergraduate researcher on the project, said the campaign has been in the works for a while, starting this June when they trained over the summer and traveled to Chile in December. Though Chambers did not go to South America with the team, he stayed back and examined data from the two sites produced in Chile.
The team originally traveled to Santiago, Chile and stayed in small towns outside of the city. After getting permission from the university, they followed a strict COVID-19 protocol, quarantined and took tests to make sure they were healthy before traveling.
During their stay, there was a couple of challenges they faced. One being the weather in their study compared to when their collaborators did research.
“When the Montana team went in 2019, it was beautiful summer weather as it is supposed to be in December in South America,” Bernards said. “During the eclipse, we had an atmospheric phenomenon, called an atmospheric river, directly overhead. It poured rain on us throughout the entire time. What we quickly learned is that all of our easy data analysis is not so easy anymore and that’s really what we’re working on now.”
An atmospheric river is a horizontal column of air that carries a lot of water at high speeds, Chambers said. When they hit land, it created a lot of condensation because of high speeds and a large amount of water vapor causing the rain.
The team has continued to analyze research and atmospheric conditions caused by the eclipse.
“We don’t have definitive findings yet,” Bernards said. “The data analysis was complicated by the presence of the rain. Here’s the anomaly induced by the eclipse. We’re trying to distinguish the anomalies induced by the atmospheric conditions as well as those induced by the eclipse.”
Emily Pearce can be reached at arg-news@uidaho.edu or on Twitter @Emily_A_Pearce