Teams of students from three US universities have for the first time been able to measure what scientists have long predicted: eclipses can generate atmospheric gravitational waves.
These waves were identified in data captured during the October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse over North America as part of the NASA-sponsored Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP).
Through NEBP, teams of high school and college students were placed along the path of the eclipse through several US states, where they launched weather balloons equipped with instruments designed for engineering studies or atmospheric science experiments. A group of scientific teams in New Mexico collected data that definitively demonstrated the link between the eclipse and the formation of , a discovery that could improve weather forecasts.
“Understanding how the atmosphere reacts in the special case of eclipses helps us better understand the atmosphere, which in turn helps us make more accurate weather forecasts and ultimately better understand climate change.” say those who carried out the experiments.
The students confirmed that eclipses create atmospheric gravity waves
Previous teams have also looked for atmospheric gravitational waves during , research supported by NASA and the US National Science Foundation. In 2019, a NEBP team stationed in Chile collected promising data, but balloon launches at hourly intervals did not provide enough detail. Attempts to repeat the experiment in 2020 were hampered by travel restrictions imposed by COVID-19 in Argentina and heavy rain that prevented data collection in Chile.
Project leaders took these lessons into account when planning the 2023 experiment, scheduling balloon launches every 15 minutes and carefully choosing the locations with the highest potential for success.
“New Mexico looked particularly promising. Most sources of atmospheric gravity waves are convection, weather systems, and mountains. We wanted to rule out all these possible sources,” said Jie Gong, a researcher at NASA’s Climate and Radiation Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and part of the atmospheric gravitational wave research.
The project created a “supersite” in Moriarty, New Mexico, where four atmospheric science teams were clustered: two from Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and one each from the State University of New York (SUNY) Albany and SUNY Oswego.
How did the experiments go?
Students began releasing balloons at 10 a.m. the day before the eclipse.
“They worked in shifts throughout the day and night, and then they were all out in the field for the eclipse,” said Eric Kelsey, research associate professor at Plymouth State and NEBP’s Northeast regional leader.
Each balloon launched by the science teams carried a radiosonde, a suite of instruments that measured temperature, location, humidity, direction and wind speed every second of its ascent through the atmosphere. The radiosondes transmitted this raw data stream to the ground team. The students uploaded the data to a shared server, where Gong and two graduate students spent months processing and analyzing the information.
Confirmation that the eclipse generated atmospheric gravity waves in the sky above New Mexico came in the spring of 2024.
“We put all the data together as a function of time and when we graphed this time series, we could already see the streaks in the signal. I bombarded everyone with emails. We were very excited,” Gong said.
The program gave many students their first experience in data collection. But the benefits go beyond technical and scientific skills.
“Students learned enormously by practicing launching . It was a huge learning curve. They had to work together to solve all the logistical aspects and overcome the difficulties. It’s good teamwork skills practice,” Kelsey said.
“All this is technically complicated. Although we now focus on the scientific result, the most important part is that it was the students who made this possible,” said Des Jardins.
