5 articles
How a thunderstorm separates electric charge with updrafts and colliding ice until the air breaks down, and why the brilliant flash is a return stroke traveling upward.
How solar-wind particles funneled to the poles by Earth's magnetic field excite oxygen and nitrogen high in the atmosphere, making it emit the green, red, and purple light of the aurora.
Sunlight comes in as visible light and leaves as infrared, and a handful of molecules are transparent to one and opaque to the other. That asymmetry sets the temperature of the planet.
Differential heating, adiabatic lapse rates, and latent heat — how one energy imbalance builds thunderstorms, deserts, jet streams, and a hard two-week limit on forecasting.
What ozone is, how the Chapman cycle builds and destroys it while absorbing UV, how one chlorine atom from a CFC can eat tens of thousands of ozone molecules, and why the ozone hole is a different problem from global warming.