@dailyspacetime: 🌪️ Sinlaku Made Rings Above The Clouds Super Typhoon Sinlaku left a ring pattern high above the storm that satellites could see at night. NASA Earth Observatory says VIIRS on NOAA-20 captured the concentric gravity waves on April 12, 2026 UTC through faint upper-atmosphere nightglow. The storm had strengthened from category 2 to category 5 in the previous 24 hours, and the Moon was only about 25 percent illuminated, which helped the weak signal stand out. Those rings are not ocean waves; they are atmospheric gravity waves launched upward by intense cyclone convection near the eyewall. AIRS on NASA's Aqua satellite also detected related thermal signatures in the stratosphere on April 13, showing the disturbance had climbed through multiple layers of the atmosphere. These waves can help reveal storm intensification over open ocean, where direct observations are harder. They can also disturb the ionosphere, which is why a tropical cyclone can matter for satellite signals and radio communications far above the weather system itself. Compared with a normal storm snapshot, this one shows the weather system pushing energy higher than the cloud deck and into layers usually tracked by specialized orbital sensors. The scale is the weird part: a storm over the Pacific pushed a pattern high enough for orbital sensors to read it as rings over the clouds. The video stays inside the source image so the rare pattern remains the story: one storm, one satellite view, rings climbing into the upper atmosphere. Follow @dailyspacestories for more space stories! 🌪️ #Space #Sinlaku #NASA #EarthScience #SpaceWeather

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Saturday 11 July 2026 21:40:07 GMT