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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, January 28, 1993                   TAG: 9301280107
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

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RIVERS IN THE SKY DISCOVERED WATER VAPOR RIVALS FLOW OF AMAZON

To their surprise, scientists have discovered that the Earth's lower atmosphere is laced with rivers of water vapor rivaling the Amazon in the massiveness of their flow.

Those rivers "are the main mechanism by which [atmospheric] water gets transported from the equator to the poles," said Reginald E. Newell of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported on the findings in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.

He said the concentrated streams, releasing not only moisture but latent heat in the higher latitudes, may turn out to be the main sources of hurricanes.

Climatologists have long understood that warm moist air rises from Earth's equatorial regions and drifts toward the poles along a course slightly offset by the motion of the Earth's spin. And the newly detected rivers flow in the expected directions. The surprise is that, for reasons so far undetermined, the moisture is confined in narrow streams, rather than flooding willy-nilly in broad bands.

In data from an instrument flown aboard a space shuttle, reinforced by independent data from an ozone-mapping satellite, they detected five rivers in the Southern Hemisphere and four or five in the Northern Hemisphere. Flowing at an altitude of no more than 1.9 miles above Earth's surface, they stretch typically to lengths of 4,800 miles or so, with widths ranging from 420 to 480 miles, and they sometimes undulate horizontally.

The flow volumes typically 364 million pounds of water per second, which is comparable to an average flow in the Amazon.

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