Latest news with #Moeckel
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Contractors join forces to tackle tornado debris
ST. LOUIS – Since the devastating tornado struck, some of the biggest names in construction have come together to clean up storm debris and move forward in the recovery. Enter the Greater St. Louis Tornado Recovery Effort. 'There's a lot going on,' Rick Moeckel, Clayco executive vice president, said. 'This right here is the path. Over 10,000 structures were impacted; 80% of those were inhabited. You had debris everywhere. So, the first thing we started with was debris removal.' The list is long; from Alberici Constructors, Fred Weber, Spire, McCarthy, Goodwin Brothers, Paric, TW Constructors, Cass, Musick, Paradigm, Hillsdale, Tarlton, Keeley, Arco, Millstone Weber, all gathering in the Urban League parking lot and heading out each day into the community since Saturday, May 17. 'Devil in the Ozarks' escapes north Arkansas prison 'Maybe you had 10 pieces of equipment and 10 people,' Moeckel said. 'By Thursday, that number grew and grew, and we were at 150 people Thursday and Friday, with 40 pieces of equipment and 25 trucks and really making a dent.' A Greater Ville resident said they need quality contractors and bricklayers to fix what can be fixed and rebuild what can't, so residents can move on emotionally. 'The thing that I've been most impressed with is that everyone is just ready to jump in,' Moeckel said. 'We're working on figuring this thing out and it's been almost seamless in a way. It's been kind of this one team, one love for the city push.' Tornado Recovery Info 🌪️ Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Bizarre softball-sized 'mushballs' explain missing gas on Jupiter
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The weather forecast for Jupiter now includes softball-size hailstones, known as "mushballs," that are brewed by violent thunderstorms raging in the planet's turbulent atmosphere, a new study finds. The findings confirm these bizarre, ammonia-rich mushballs are also the source of Jupiter's missing ammonia. The absence of this gas in pockets of Jupiter's atmosphere has perplexed scientists for years. Decades ago, astronomers spotted intensely turbulent cloud tops in telescope images of the gas giant. The discovery led scientists to conclude that Jupiter's atmosphere churns and mixes constantly, like a pot of boiling water. Yet recent data from Earth-based radio telescopes and NASA's Juno spacecraft revealed deep pockets of missing ammonia — reaching 90 miles (150 kilometers) deep across all latitudes. This depletion is so significant in the planet's atmosphere that no known mechanism could explain it. Now, the new study's analysis of the aftermath of a massive 2017 storm observed by Juno offers compelling evidence that Jupiter's raging storms are the key to this atmospheric puzzle. The findings also reveal that even localized storms can strip ammonia from the planet's upper atmosphere and plunge it unexpectedly deep, indicating that the long-held vision of a thoroughly mixed atmosphere swirling around Jupiter is an illusion. "The top of the atmosphere is actually a pretty poor representation of what the whole planet looks like," study lead author Chris Moeckel, a researcher in the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science. "As time goes by, we have to dig deeper and deeper into the atmosphere to find the place where it appears well-mixed." Moeckel and his colleagues described their findings in a study published March 28 in the journal Science Advances. Because of the dense cloud cover blanketing Jupiter, scientists cannot directly observe what lies beneath the planet's turbulent cloud tops. The role of ammonia is like a splash of color in a flowing stream of water, Moeckel said: It acts as a tracer, revealing otherwise-invisible patterns and processes deep within Jupiter's atmosphere. To explain the missing ammonia in Jupiter's atmosphere, in 2020 scientists theorized that the planet's violent storms generate strong updrafts that rapidly lift ammonia-rich ice particles to high altitudes, where they combine with water ice into a slushy liquid. Much like Earth's hailstones, Jovian mushballs grow by accumulating ice layers as storm currents repeatedly cycle them, eventually reaching softball size and falling deep into Jupiter's atmosphere, far below their origin. This process, the theory posited, left upper regions depleted of ammonia and water that Juno and ground-based telescopes detected. A distinct signature within the radio observations beamed back by Juno confirmed that this exotic process is indeed occurring, the new study found. During its February 2017 flyby, the spacecraft passed over an active storm region, and its instruments showed a higher concentration of both ammonia and water nestled beneath the storm cloud. "I was actually sitting at the dentist's office waiting and I was playing with the code," Moeckel said. "All of a sudden I saw a signal much deeper at the same location as the storm clouds were at the top, and I remember being like 'Huh,' I didn't expect anything down here." The peculiar signal, which persisted even a month after the storm began, could only be explained by either a drop in temperature consistent with melting ice or an increase in ammonia concentration, which would occur if the ammonia within the mushballs was being released as they melted. RELATED STORIES —Powerful solar winds squish Jupiter's magnetic field 'like a giant squash ball' —NASA solves 44-year-old mystery of why Jupiter's Io is so volcanically active —Jupiter's Great Red Spot is being squeezed, Hubble Telescope finds — and nobody knows why "Both theories led me to the same conclusion — the only known mechanism was these mushballs," Moeckel said. "That's the moment I conceded." The researchers suspect Jupiter is unlikely to be unique in this regard, as gases such as ammonia are swept into forming planets and are likely circulating in the atmospheres of hydrated gas giants both within our solar system and beyond. "I won't be surprised if this is happening throughout the universe," Moeckel said.
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Hailstorms on Jupiter Pelt Giant Slushee Balls of Ammonia And Water
Weather on Jupiter may have some surprising similarities to Earth phenomena, but some things it does defy easy explanation. Now, scientists have come up with one to explain the strange compositional properties of its wild clouds: during giant storms of thunder and lightning, Jupiter rains a hail of "mushballs", huge clumps of mushy ice consisting of ammonia and water, with a consistency like wet snow or a convenience store slushee. It's the best scenario astronomers have come up with to explain why Jupiter's atmosphere – and those of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – have such a patchy distribution of ammonia. "Imke [de Pater] and I both were like, 'There's no way in the world this is true,'" says planetary scientist Chris Moeckel of the University of California (UC) Berkeley, who led the research. "So many things have to come together to actually explain this, it seems so exotic. I basically spent three years trying to prove this wrong. And I couldn't prove it wrong." The hypothesis first emerged in 2020, when scientists studying data from Jupiter probe Juno suggested a peculiar mechanism for the extraction of ammonia and water from the planet's upper atmosphere. Jupiter's massive storms, they proposed, eject water high above the planet's water clouds, where they encounter ammonia vapor that melts the ice. Then, the water and ammonia freeze together in the extreme cold. "At these altitudes, the ammonia acts like an antifreeze, lowering the melting point of water ice and allowing the formation of a cloud with ammonia-water liquid," planetary scientist Heidi Becker of NASA' s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained at the time. "In this new state, falling droplets of ammonia-water liquid can collide with the upgoing water-ice crystals and electrify the clouds. This was a big surprise, as ammonia-water clouds do not exist on Earth." To investigate whether this is even possible, Moeckel and his colleagues, Imke de Pater of UC Berkeley and Huazhi Ge of Caltech, pored over data collected by Juno and the Hubble Space Telescope in July 2017, as the probe flew over a giant lightning storm that is still raging to this day. Juno took recordings in six different radio frequencies with its microwave radiometer instrument, while Hubble made observations across ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared wavelengths. Jupiter's atmosphere is pretty wild, with multiple storms unlike anything on Earth raging at any given time. Most of the weather, however, is relatively shallow. In a preprint currently undergoing peer review, Moeckel, de Pater, and a separate team describe the 3D structure of the upper atmosphere, revealing that most of the weather systems only extend 10 to 20 kilometers (6.2 to 12.4 miles) below the visible cloud tops. Some weather systems, however, plunge much deeper into the troposphere, such as cyclonic vortices, ammonia-rich cloud bands, and the violent lightning storms in which the mushballs emerge. "Every time you look at Jupiter, it's mostly just surface level. It's shallow, but a few things – vortices and these big storms – can punch through," Moeckel says. "We're basically showing that the top of the atmosphere is actually a pretty bad representative of what is inside the planet." These mushball storms effectively unmix the upper atmosphere. The mushballs form and they fall, depleting the atmosphere of ammonia down to about 150 kilometers, but transporting it deeper into the planetary interior. Previously, scientists had no idea what had removed the ammonia. Mushballs explain it perfectly. Water starts its journey deep in the clouds before being flung upwards, meeting with ammonia, and mixing in a ratio of around three parts water to one ammonia. The mixed blobs freeze and fall deep into Jupiter, where they evaporate and deposit their contents. This requires really specific conditions, such as extremely strong updrafts to carry the water, and extremely rapid mixing so that the mushballs can form and grow large enough to survive raining back down into Jupiter's atmosphere. The smoking gun was one signal in the Juno radio data. "There was a small spot under the cloud that either looked like cooling, that is, melting ice, or an ammonia enhancement, that is, melting and release of ammonia," Moeckel says. "It was the fact that either explanation was only possible with mushballs that eventually convinced me." This transport mechanism is unlikely to be unique to Jupiter. Scientists have hypothesized that similar mechanisms might be at play on all the giant planets in the Solar System, and beyond. Let's hope future observations can find them. The research has been published in Science Advances. Half The Universe's Matter Was Missing. Astronomers Just Found It. Curiosity Finds First In Situ Evidence of Carbon Cycle on Ancient Mars There's A Sky Full of Meteors in April! Here's What's on This Easter Weekend
