Mesospheres

Venus ♀ Mars ♂ Earth ♁

Mesospheric Clouds - Venus, Mars, Earth

I look up stuff on the internet. I don’t do research. I am not a scientist. But I can read. I read a lot of peer-reviewed research papers, in addition to Calvin and Hobbes. The more I read, the less I know, but I think I understand some things. I write Abbott’s Almanac because I want to tell everyone what I’m thinking. My wife calls my Substack efforts, “chatbox.” I think because it rhymes with cat-box …but, I haven’t asked her.

Fighting my confirmation bias is a little bit like fighting counterfeiting. The best way to spot a counterfeit bill is to have an intimate familiarity with the genuine. All those hombres in the movies biting and bending those coins with their teeth. That’s old school. Maybe it was all those utility poles I inspected when I was young. The pole inspector’s manual called it, “an art, not a science.” It was so easy to miss the decay. Many were the poles I walked away from, hearing Oliver Cromwell whispering to me, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken?” You can’t be a good pole inspector if you are not a humble pole inspector. No Hubris

Very Good Albert - but next time… show your work “C-”

I know I don’t - ‘show my work.’ But I can tell you about the father of the footnote, the half-blind historian, William H Prescott. He cheated. It would be nice to have an eidetic memory. Or Richard Hofstadter, who would substitute book-length bibliographies for footnotes. Isn’t that cheating? Am I lazy, or a realist? Sometimes I suspect nobody reads my articles very carefully. I know almost no one clicks on the links. I’m not exactly overwhelmed with comments, so if you ever want my sources, I will dig them up for you on request, just ask. Anyway, I need to be rechecking my work, even if I don’t show it here. No excuses, I can get details wrong sometimes.

Mesospheres

Back to Frank’s Small Comets. Cosmic Rain: The Controversial Discovery of Small Comets, Frank, Louis A., Huyghe, Patrick - Amazon.com As most of my readers know, Abbott’s Almanac sort of exists for reviewing the evidence for small comets, and now, some of it is over forty years old. In 1982 Professor Louis A. Frank and his graduate students at the University of Iowa discovered dense, transitory, clouds of water vapor in the upper atmosphere, evidenced in the auroral images they were analyzing from the Dynamics Explorer 1 satellite. The ‘spots’ or ‘atmospheric holes’ in the images were the debris fields of a new planetary body they called, “Small Comets,” which they described as forty-ton snowballs covered with a thin carbon mantle. They estimated ten million small comets a year, one every three seconds, were infalling into Earth’s atmosphere.

This essay is discussing H₂O in the mesospheres of Mars, Earth and Venus. All three mesospheres are very dry. But not completely dry, and it’s a puzzle that there is any water in those three mesospheres at all. H₂O is a vapor, not a gas. It’s conserved. As water vapor rises, it condenses and falls back towards the surface of the planet. Heavier gases like CO₂ and Methane (CH4) are similarly held in the atmosphere by gravity, but without a vapor condensation to aggregate the effective weight. The gases’ varying molecular weights correlate to various atmospheric life expectancies. In other words, because water is a vapor below 100 C its conservation is pretty much total. It doesn’t keep going up, up, up, and away, like a gas. When molecules do get into the uppermost parts of the atmosphere; the Mesosphere, Mesopause, Thermosphere, Exosphere:

Upper Atmosphere includes Exosphere, Thermosphere Mesosphere, sometimes together referred to as the Ionosphere

Sometimes called the Ionosphere, the particles/energy in the solar wind tears the molecules apart through endothermic processes. Those lighter elemental particles are pulled into the “solar wind” and carried away from the planet’s gravitational force. The magnetic fields of the three planets are each very different from the other two and they have profound effects on the solar wind’s interaction within the ionospheres of each planet. I will simplify the complex and not write about the three very different magnetic fields, except to point out the Earth’s is strongest, by far. Your eyes will glaze over if I get started.

Mesospheric clouds called Noctilucent clouds, (night-shining clouds) or more properly, polar mesospheric clouds (PMC) are observed in the earth's mesospheric polar regions in summer. The highest clouds on earth, they form 80 km above the surface. PMCs are observed most frequently around the summer solstice. The southern hemisphere annually has half the number of the noctilucent clouds as the northern hemisphere. They aren’t as big and bright either. The Auroral PMCs beat the Australs in ratio 2:1, year in and year out. Now, look at the charts below:

Seasonal Small Comet flux as observed in the POLAR, Dynamics Explorer, and 1957 Radar Meteor Rates, Ottawa, Canada

Frank observed a distinct annual variation in the small comet in-fall rates. No one has ever challenged his seasonal variations. Different spacecraft, both Dynamics and POLAR, different imaging equipment, even some 1957 back-scatter radar observations, decades before Frank's work, were seeing ‘something’ that Frank was convinced were his small comet debris fields. All three data sets, over decades long periods of observation show exactly the same seasonal variations.

There is a dramatic drop in the frequency of the small comets towards the end of November to almost nothing in the middle of January, then a resumption in late January, increasing through May to a peak in June and a sustained high flux until the first of November. Different spacecraft, different imaging equipment operating over decades show the same June peak and the November collapse in small comet frequency.

Mid-December is the Austral summer solstice. That solstice correlates with the middle of the small comet dearth. The much more plentiful PMC displays in the Auroral (Northern) summer correlate perfectly with Frank's June observation of the small comet peak.

We don’t have a reasonable source for the water that is responsible for the mesospheric clouds other than Frank’s Small Comets. The seasonal variation in PMCs between the North and South Poles appears to conform more or less perfectly to the seasonal variation in small comet in-fall rates.

John Olivero was a meteorologist and atmospheric physicist who, more or less, spent his whole career studying the upper atmosphere. He and Clayne Yeats were the only two physicists who took Frank's discovery seriously enough to honestly try and confirm Frank's observations. Olivero's radiometry observations could see the mesospheric water vapor clouds. Olivero understood in 1986 the potential extraterrestrial source implications for Mars and Venus. Venus and Mars have mesospheric clouds too.

There is no good answer to this question: How is water vapor/H₂O transported from the three planets’ surfaces through the boundary layers into the 50 to 100 km mesospheric altitudes? There is no doubt methane (CH4) can be converted into (H2O) in Earth’s Ionosphere by the solar wind. But nobody thinks the methane budget for the upper atmosphere is anywhere close to adequate to be the source of the water-ice we see in the mesosphere.

Consider that both Venus and Mars have very little measurable water vapor in their respective lower atmospheres, around 20 ppm. Earth’s tropospheric budget for Water Vapor (WV) is close to 5000 ppm.

Earth’s upper atmosphere is very dry. Muy Seco

Both Mars’ and Venus’ atmospheres are 95% CO₂. The atmospheric pressure on Mars’ surface is 1% of Earth’s. Venus’ surface atmospheric pressure is ninety times greater than Earth’s. Venus’ surface is the hottest in the solar system. It’s hotter than Mercury, close to 900°F. Mars’ surface temperature averages around -60°C. If we can’t explain H₂O upward transport into Earth’s mesosphere, how can we hope to explain it for Mars and Venus? So why do all three planets have more or less identical water budgets for their respective mesospheres?

The picture is of Martian Polar Mesospheric Clouds, (PMC), aka, noctilucent clouds.

The small comets are a straightforward explanation for both the presence and the variability of H₂O in the mesospheres of all three planets. Small comets are the best explanation. I assert they are the only plausible explanation. The wild talk about dust storms on Mars being the H₂O transport mechanism to the mesosphere on Mars, that is a case of Mr. Speculative Conjecture marrying Miss Intemperate Enthusiasm. It’s true that dust storms occasionally reach mesospheric heights on Mars. But the proposed transport mechanism of H2O is enigmatic, to say the least. Consider the similarly large spatial, diurnal and seasonal variability of H2O in the three mesospheres. That is exactly what you would expect if the delivery method was small comets. Gases very much tend to be evenly distributed in an atmosphere.

Looking at H₂O in the mesospheres of all three planets, considering how similar the concentrations and variabilities of H₂O are in those mesospheres, why not consider the possibility small comets are delivering it?

It would do no good for me to rant about the deplorable state of science - science so called, these days. I will leave it, “they are a timorous bunch.” Controversial ideas within disciples are perceived as risks ‘too big’ to take. Back in the day, men like Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo, Newton - were all rich guys. They didn’t expect tenure or a paycheck. They could let their minds wonder about anything - no fences. Kepler was not exactly rich. He worked for the Holy Roman Emperor - court mathematician. He got paid to do astrology, (and write almanacs). He proved the heliocentric solar system and wrote up his three laws on planetary motion in his spare time. Call him the first “snowflake.” Ha. I like Kepler. Anyway, mathematicians aren’t cowboys. They like math and they are inclined to work on math problems that won’t get them into trouble. Frank says he wished he hadn’t discovered small comets, or at least not so many. The problem with science these days, is it’s too easy to make trouble for yourself. Better not stir the pot, or drive through other people’s well-tended gardens.

I say, “fortune favors the bold.” Physics will be treading water until they understand Frank’s experiments, when repeated, give the same results. Small comets are the most exciting astronomical discovery since the heliocentric solar system. But Frank’s discovery lies ignored and forgotten. It’s a shabby testament to the monstrous edifice of what we call modern science. That’s what I think. I also think you deserve a prize if you read this essay clear through to the end.

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