New findings from NASA’s Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE), mounted aboard the International Space Station, are reshaping the way scientists understand the connection between terrestrial weather and the upper atmosphere. Researchers reported in late 2024 and into 2025 that atmospheric gravity waves generated by storms, mountain ranges and other surface-level phenomena are propagating far higher into the mesosphere than previously documented — a discovery with significant implications for satellite operations, radio communications and the burgeoning field of space weather forecasting.

The AWE instrument, which began collecting data after its November 2023 launch, was designed to measure airglow — a faint emission of light from molecules in the mesosphere roughly 87 kilometres above Earth’s surface. By tracking ripples in this airglow, scientists can map the behaviour of atmospheric gravity waves that originate in the lower atmosphere and travel upward, transferring energy and momentum into regions where weather and space begin to merge.

What AWE Is Finding

Early results from the mission indicate that the coupling between Earth’s lower atmosphere and the ionosphere is more dynamic and complex than older models suggested. According to a project overview published by NASA, the instrument has captured detailed images of waves rippling through the mesopause region, including features generated by tropical convection and large weather systems thousands of kilometres below.

This is fundamentally an aeronomy story — the discipline that studies the upper atmosphere, where neutral gases interact with charged particles and where solar radiation drives chemistry that has no analogue at ground level. For decades, aeronomers suspected that terrestrial weather contributed to disturbances in the ionosphere, but quantifying that link has proven difficult because the relevant region — between roughly 50 and 300 kilometres altitude — is too high for balloons and too low for most satellites to sample efficiently.

Why the Coupling Matters

The ionosphere is the layer of the atmosphere that reflects high-frequency radio signals and through which GPS, satellite communications and certain navigation signals must pass. Disturbances in this layer can degrade or interrupt those services. Historically, space weather forecasters have focused on solar drivers — flares, coronal mass ejections and the solar wind — as the dominant source of ionospheric variability. But recent research, including work summarised by the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, increasingly recognises that “weather from below” can produce ionospheric irregularities even during quiet solar conditions.

That matters for practical reasons. The Federal Aviation Administration relies on accurate GPS signals for precision approaches; the U.S. military uses high-frequency radio for over-the-horizon communication; commercial airliners on polar routes depend on stable ionospheric conditions. If gravity waves launched by a typhoon in the Pacific can seed plasma bubbles that disrupt GPS hours later over a different continent, forecasters need to know about it.

Building a Whole-Atmosphere View

AWE is part of a broader scientific push to integrate the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere into a single forecasting framework — sometimes called the “whole atmosphere” approach. Complementary missions like NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) and the Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) instrument have laid groundwork by observing the ionosphere directly. Detailed mission information from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and partner institutions describes how these datasets are being merged with ground-based radar networks and numerical models to produce a more coherent picture.

Lead investigators on the AWE team, based at Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory, have emphasised that the mission’s two-year baseline observation period should help isolate seasonal patterns in wave activity, distinguishing, for instance, the contribution of the Asian monsoon from that of Southern Hemisphere storm tracks.

What to Watch Next

Over the coming year, AWE data are expected to be folded into operational space weather models, potentially improving forecasts of scintillation events that disrupt satellite signals. Researchers will also be watching how the upper atmosphere responds as the current solar maximum wanes, because the relative influence of terrestrial gravity waves becomes easier to detect when solar activity declines. If the early results hold, textbooks may need substantial revisions to reflect just how tightly Earth’s weather and the edge of space are bound together.

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