NationalCenterForAtmosphericResearch
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The UAE wants an artificial mountain to increase rainfall
Desert countries are frequently victims of their elevation. They tend to be mostly flat, making it tough for air to climb upwards and form rain clouds. The United Arab Emirates thinks there's a direct solution to this, however: make your own mountain. It's in the early stages of developing an artificial mountain that would force air upwards and create clouds that (with seeding) could produce additional rainfall. In theory, an arid landscape could become verdant over time.
The US' next climate science supercomputer is twice as fast
Ever since 2012, scientists have been leaning on the Yellowstone supercomputer to model and predict climate. It's a powerful ally, especially when it's still one of the fastest computers on the planet. However, it's about to be upstaged: the US National Center of Atmospheric Research has unveiled plans to build Cheyenne, an even beastlier machine. When it's ready in 2017, the Silicon Graphics-made, Intel Xeon-powered supercomputer should calculate up to 5.34 petaflops per second, or 2.5 times more than Yellowstone. It'll also have a whopping 313TB of memory, and 20 petabytes (!) of dedicated storage.
Watch gravity waves ripple through Earth's atmosphere
You might think of gravity as an invisible force here on Earth, but that's not entirely true... if you have the right computer simulation, that is. Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research have developed a climate model that shows the gravity waves in the upper atmosphere, where their amplitude is strong enough to create huge ripples. The trick is a higher-resolution model that replicates the waves at their source, and follows them on their way up. As you can see here, the results are dramatic -- gravity is virtually invisible near the surface, but it's impossible to miss when you're 60 miles up.
