Venus Weather Not Boring After All, NASA/International Study Shows

At first glance, a weather forecaster for Venus would have either a really easy or a really boring job, depending on your point of view. The climate on Venus is widely known to be unpleasant at the surface, the planet roasts at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit under a suffocating blanket of sulfuric acid clouds and a crushing atmosphere more than 90 times the pressure of Earth's. Intrepid future explorers should abandon any hope for better days, however, because it won't change much.

"Any variability in the weather on Venus is noteworthy, because the planet has so many features to keep atmospheric conditions the same," says Dr. Tim Livengood, a researcher with the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, Capitol Heights, Md., and now with the University of Maryland, College Park, Md.

"Earth has seasons because its rotation axis is tilted by about 23 degrees, which changes the intensity of sunlight and the length of the day in each hemisphere throughout the year. However, Venus has been tilted so much, it's almost completely upside down, leaving it with a net tilt of less than three degrees from the sun, so the seasonal effect is negligible," explains Livengood, who is stationed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"Also, its orbit is even more circular than Earth's, which prevents it from getting significantly hotter or cooler by moving closer to or further away from the sun. And while you might expect things to cool down at night especially since Venus rotates so slowly that its night lasts almost two Earth months the thick atmosphere and sulfuric acid clouds act like a blanket while winds move heat around, keeping temperatures pretty even. Finally, almost all the planet's water has escaped to space, so you don't get any storms or precipitation like on Earth where water evaporates and condenses as clouds."

However, higher up, the weather gets more interesting, according to a new study of old data by NASA and international scientists. The team detected strange things going on in data from telescopic observations of Venus in infrared light at about 68 miles (110 kilometers) above the planet's surface, in cold, clear air above the acid clouds, in two layers called the mesosphere and the thermosphere.

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