Is Space Weather a Thing? | StarTalk

Another kind of weather more traditional way to think about whether is what the air is doing on planets that have atmospheres.

And moons don't have an atmosphere, so we don't think about them. Whether Mars has an atmosphere, Jupiter has an atmosphere, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune— a couple of moons have atmospheres.

So when you study those, you see interesting patterns. You see storms, you see eddies, which are these are tiny little spiral patterns of air that might be their version of a tornado.

And so I think you can only really deeply understand weather on Earth once you study the weather on other planets. A planet that rotates faster than Earth, one that rotates less fast, one that has higher gravity, lesser gravity, and you can see the full range of how weather takes shape in the full spectrum of planets that are out there.

And then you find out where Earth fits. Hello! That's why that's that way, because this is what happens in that extreme and that's what happens in the other extreme.

So that's really what when I think of space weather, that's what I would like to reflect on. Tornadoes are way more fun than snowstorms.

If you're just watching weather phenomenon, tornadoes or any anti-cyclone, just to think about the energy it contains and what it's doing with that energy—what in the weather system was the precursor conditions to that storm?

Way more fascinating to study than the snowflakes coming out of the sky. [Music]