Photo of the Week: Southern Lights

The Aurora Australis, or southern lights, shine as a green beam shoots into the sky from the second Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Mobile Facility (dubbed AMF2) near McMurdo Station in this image by Joshua Swanson with the United States Antarctic Program.

The green beam is from the High Spectral Resolution Lidar, part of a suite of sophisticated instruments being used by the ARM West Antarctic Radiation Experiment (AWARE) to study the atmospheric energy balance, cloud microphysics, precipitation, and aerosol chemistry of Antarctica.

Led by research physicist Dan Lubin and including co-investigator Lynn Russell of Scripps Oceanography's Climate, Atmospheric Science and Physical Oceanography (CASPO) division , AWARE is a collaborative project between the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Read more at the AWARE site.

Related Image Gallery: Photo of the Week 2016