On May 21, NASA powered down a small but mighty instrument aboard the International Space Station—one that has fundamentally changed how scientists understand the invisible bridge between Earth's weather and the cosmos. The Atmospheric Waves Experiment, or AWE, spent 30 months scanning infrared ripples in our sky, and in doing so, revealed that thunderstorms over Texas, hurricanes battering Florida, and winds gusting over mountain ranges don't simply dissipate at the cloud layer. Instead, they send invisible waves crashing into the edge of space itself.
This discovery matters because space weather directly affects the orbital economy we now depend on. The variations AWE tracked in Earth's upper atmosphere can disrupt the radio signals flowing between satellites and ground stations, degrading the accuracy of navigation systems, communications, and timing signals that guide everything from commercial flights to financial transactions. Understanding how terrestrial weather generates these disturbances opens new avenues for prediction and protection.
Since its installation on the exterior of the International Space Station in November 2023, AWE captured four infrared images every second, accumulating more than 80 million nighttime images. These weren't random snapshots—they were precise measurements of airglow, the colorful bands of light that reveal atmospheric gravity waves: giant ripples in the atmosphere triggered by strong winds flowing over mountains or by violent weather. During a May 2024 tornado outbreak across the central U.S., and again when Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida's Gulf Coast in September 2024, AWE recorded something rarely seen with such clarity before: the exact fingerprints of how Earth's most intense weather systems reach upward into space.
The data revealed nuances that surprised researchers. When AWE observed atmospheric gravity waves generated by a severe thunderstorm in north Texas on May 26, 2024, the waves appeared smaller and more irregular than those created by storms earlier that month in the same region, with a striking asymmetry from north to south. A tornado near the U.S.–Mexico border on May 3 created near-perfect concentric circles spreading across Texas and Mexico—a sight rarely observed with such precision. These variations showed that different types of storms generate distinctly different atmospheric signatures, each with its own way of reaching toward space.
According to a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, the gravity waves with the greatest influence on the upper atmosphere have small horizontal wavelengths ranging from 30 to 300 kilometers—precisely what AWE was designed to measure. This specificity made the mission's success possible. As Joe Westlake, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, noted, the findings prove that "our atmosphere is not a ceiling, but a living, breathing ocean in the sky."
The mission exceeded its original two-year timeline, a testament to both the instrument's durability and the urgent scientific questions it continued to answer. Now, as ground controllers have powered down the instrument, the focus shifts to analyzing the vast trove of data AWE collected. Researchers at Utah State University's Space Dynamics Laboratory, led by principal investigator Ludger Scherliess, will spend the coming years unlocking new insights into how the weather below shapes the space environment above—insights that could ultimately help protect the infrastructure our modern world depends on.