Dark skies for all

Dark Chocolate and Metabolic Syndrome; Do Polyphenols All that Matter?

Digital all-sky polarization imaging of partly cloudy skies.

Clouds reduce the degree of linear polarization (DOLP) of skylight relative to that of a clear sky. Even thin subvisual clouds in the "twilight zone" between clouds and aerosols produce a drop in skylight DOLP long before clouds become visible in the sky. In contrast, the angle of polarization (AOP) of light scattered by a cloud in a partly cloudy sky remains the same as in the clear sky for mo...

Cloudy Skies

Standard Gaussian-type statistics are not really adequate to describe atmospheric variability; this traditional approach implicitly dismisses fluctuations as "noise" of use only in computing a standard deviation which, together with the mean, presumably varies so little in space and time that one can meaningfully speak of "climatological" values. In geophysics, unfortunately, this approach ofte...

Blue skies for the best people.

DOI: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.114.305403 1 Editor’s preamble: The criteria for awarding research grants are a topic of the utmost importance, one that needs to be examined and debated carefully. As the readers probably know, there are strong and disparate viewpoints regarding this problem. Accordingly, in line with our editorial vision (1), this issue of Circulation Research features a News &Views co...

Geoengineering: Whiter skies?

[1] One proposed side effect of geoengineering with stratospheric sulfate aerosols is sky whitening during the day and afterglows near sunset, as is seen after large volcanic eruptions. Sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere would increase diffuse light received at the surface, but with a non-uniform spectral distribution. We use a radiative transfer model to calculate spectral irradiance for ide...