WASHINGTON, May 9 (UPI) -- NASA and university researchers say thunderstorms over Tibet provide a main pathway for water vapor and chemicals to travel into the stratosphere.
The researchers said learning how water vapor reaches the stratosphere can help improve climate prediction models and understanding how ozone-depleting chemicals reach the stratosphere is essential for understanding future threats to the Earth's ozone layer, which shields our planet from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.
Scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, determined storms over Tibet transport nearly three times more water vapor into the lower stratosphere than more frequent thunderstorms occurring over India.
"This study shows thunderstorms over Tibet are mainly responsible for the large amount of water vapor entering the stratosphere," said Rong Fu, associate professor at Georgia Tech and leader of the study. "The rainfall may not be as frequent over Tibet as over the Indian monsoon area, but because Tibet is at a much higher elevation than India, the storms over Tibet are strong and penetrate very high, and send water vapor right into the stratosphere."
The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
