Unusual weather may have helped Ukrainian military sink Russian warship

On 13 April 2022, explosions wracked the Russian guided missile cruiser Moskva as it sailed the Black Sea more than 100 kilometers south of the Ukrainian city of Odesa. The vessel, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, sank hours later as it was being towed to port, and Ukraine claimed it had hit the cruiser with missiles. But, how did Ukrainian forces target a vessel they normally couldn’t spot so far over the horizon? New modeling, published this month in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society , suggests they caught a lucky break : Anomalous atmospheric conditions may have greatly extended the range of their missile radar. “The thorough analysis shows that militaries really need to beware of such anomalies,” says Lt. Col. Andreas Grantinger, a meteorologist with the Swedish Armed Forces weather service who was not involved in the study. Such conditions, he notes, are common in the Mediterranean and occur from time to time in other regions. Russian sources initially claimed the explosions aboard the Moskva resulted from an accident. Ukraine asserted it had sunk the ship with a pair of R-360 Neptune antiship missiles fired from a coastal battery east of Odesa. But the Moskva was about three times farther out than the range of the system’s targeting radar. Analysts speculated that a U.S. military aircraft might have pointed Ukraine to the Moskva . “At that time, it ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news