Description:

Earth's weather is increasingly modeled with attention to the solar system background, as it becomes clear that large solar events can be critical in some contexts. 

Another interaction that may be of interest in a cross-disciplinary way is whether Earth's weather and climate are affected by an infall of space dust to the Earth's surface. 

Our sister discipline, astronomy, does not have tools to equal those of meteorology in measuring such an effect.  NASA can only say, and does say, that there is dust nearby.  But the distribution of particle sizes and the structure of such a dust cloud has thus far eluded a consensus description, as in situ measurements have not sufficed, and measurement of the emission of infrared light has not informed us adequately as to exactly where it is. 

Is it near Earth? 

Dust near Earth was little considered for decades on the consideration that all space dust is young, as it is rapidly destroyed or driven outward from the Sun, and therefore there could be no accumulation near Earth except from the Moon, which was thought dead. 

But in the last ten years, evidence has accumulated to destroy the dead Moon consensus.  It appears the Moon is not dead, and if not, it may eject material at escape velocity, and such material would be ground to dust and favored to deposit itself on Moon's larger binary companion, Earth. 

This begs the question:  Where is it in our weather? 

Meteorology has not sought for it, but there are ways in which it could, via consideration of events possibly the result of dust infall:  seasonally and diurnally favored vortices in air and water, sandstorms, temperature microbursts, chilling of water near the magnetic poles, wildfires of certain types, watermass formation over the epochs, and teleconnections.   

Topics that could be covered:   

A summary of dust structures at other planets with an approach to the issue of Earth analogues, 

the seasonal and diurnal variations in forces that would drive dust to the surface,

useful databases from astronomy,

ways to associate the astronomical databases with the meteorological ones,

an approach to NWP component layers to incorporate dust structures hypothesized or observed. 

Dust structures in the plane of the lunar orbit would certainly, if they exist at all, slide in and out of phase with the seasons on a cycle of about 18.6 years first amplifying then decreasing all seasonality.  It could well look like ENSO.  How can one estimate whether ENSO is correlated with the precession of lunar nodes?  What databases, what analyses? 

Another cycle would be driven at the beat frequency of the synodal and draconitic months - about 2.5 years.  Can this forecast the QBO?  

To take another example, some dust would certainly orbit the Earth-Moon barycenter, not Earth itself.  What databases potentially follow that? What events follow?

The meteorology community is well positioned to measure such a dust cloud and could experiment using it to resolve frontier forecasting issues that affect the life and health of people and communities