As the year edges toward winter and meteor showers streak across December’s long nights, this ISSI International Team 580 is looking upward: to a region of the atmosphere that is as mysterious as it is beautiful. Their project explores the mesosphere–lower thermosphere (MLT), a thin atmospheric shell at around 80–100 km altitude. Too high for aircraft and balloons, but too low for satellites to provide direct observations. This makes the MLT one of the least explored parts of the Earth’s atmosphere. However, it is a “home” of meteors as they flare into view…
Between the air we breathe and the vastness of space lies one of the least understood parts of our planet’s atmosphere — the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT). This region, roughly 50 to 120 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, might seem remote, but it plays a crucial role in shaping the environment that satellites, astronauts, and communication systems rely on.
ISSI International Team #571, co-led by Dr. Jorge L. Chau from the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Germany and Prof. Dr. Huixin Liu from Kyushu University, Japan, set out to unravel how this “gateway to space” behaves — and why it changes so much from one day to the next, especially at low latitudes near the equator.
