Exploring the chemistry of thunderstorms

NASA: NASA researchers are about to fly off on a campaign that will take them into the heart of thunderstorm country. The Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) field campaign will use an airport in Salina, Kan., as a base to explore the impact of large thunderstorms on the concentration of ozone and other substances in the upper troposphere. The campaign is being led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA.

"Thunderstorms provide a mechanism for rapid lifting of air from the surface to higher altitudes in a matter of minutes to hours," said James Crawford of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and a member of the mission's scientific steering committee. "This allows molecules that are short-lived and more abundant near the surface to be transported to the upper troposphere in amounts that could not happen under normal atmospheric conditions," he said.

Additional chemical impacts come from the production of nitrogen oxides by lightning, but the details of these processes are not well understood.

"All of this together has an influence on ozone in the coldest part of the atmosphere where it exerts the largest influence on climate," Crawford said. "Of the chemicals we'll be studying, nitrogen oxides in particular are key to the creation of ozone and are produced both naturally by lightning and by human activity through the burning of fossil fuels."

The campaign is scheduled to run from May 15 to June 30. NASA partners include Langley, Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. and Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif...

A thunderstorm shot by Rolf van Melis (RvM), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license