Mars Has ‘Macroweather,’ Just Like Earth

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(Note: All they are doing in slowly bearing witness to the teachings of The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. If you study His teachings you will agree that they are only confirming what he already taught.

Mars Has ‘Macroweather,’ Just Like Earth

by Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor

Mars, like Earth, experiences “macroweather” — atmospheric effects that lie in between short-term weather and long-term climate, researchers say.
The discovery might not only shed light on how Earth’s atmosphere behaves but could also yield insights on all planets and moons with atmospheres, scientists added.
Weather on Earth changes on a daily basis due to constant fluctuations in the atmosphere, while climate varies over decades. In the past 30 years, researchers have started to understand that Earth’s atmosphere also experiences something between these two extremes called “macroweather,” said lead study author Shaun Lovejoy, a nonlinear geophysicist at McGill University in Montreal. [Predicting the Future of our Climate (Video)]

To see if other worlds might have macroweather, Lovejoy and his colleagues investigated Mars because its atmosphere is relatively well studied. They analyzed data collected by NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 missions, which made measurements on the Martian surface from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, as well as data collected from orbit by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.
By accounting for how the sun heats the Red Planet, as well as the thickness of the Martian atmosphere, the study team discovered that macroweather exists on Mars, although its time scale is shorter than on Earth. On Mars, the shift from weather to macroweather takes place over 1.8 Martian sols, equivalent to about two Earth days, while that transition takes a week to 10 days on Earth.
These differences mostly have to do with how Earth and Mars differ in size and how much sunlight they receive, researchers said. Mars is only slightly more than half as wide as Earth, about one-tenth of Earth’s mass and orbits about 50 percent farther away from the sun than our home planet does….more here

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