Defenses for Fall 2024
Investigating and mitigating errors in the remote sensing of maritime low clouds at night
October 21, 2024
Jesse Turner
Maritime clouds are ubiquitous to the world’s oceans and play an important role in Earth’s radiation balance within the atmosphere system. Understanding the diurnal properties and distributions of these clouds requires an observing system capable of spanning vast regions of ocean devoid of surface-based observations. Here, earth observation satellite imagery provides potentially valuable…
Investigating the potential of meltwater as a local source of ice nucleating particles in the central Arctic summer
October 15, 2024
Camille Mavis
Due to climate change, the Arctic has crossed a threshold into positive feedbacks between sea-ice loss and increased absorption of solar radiation, causing warming up to four times the global average. Parameterizing the Arctic radiation budget to predict the new steady-state is paramount for guiding policies impacting future global socio-economics and Arctic livelihoods. Arctic mixed-phase…
IMPACTS OF HISTORIC ANTHROPOGENIC AEROSOL FORCING ON LARGE CLIMATE ENSEMBLES THROUGH THE LENS OF POLEWARD ENERGY TRANSPOR
September 18, 2024
Michael Needham
In discussions of the human impact on Earth’s climate, aerosols receive much less attention than greenhouse gases. And yet, the change in the global mean effective radiative forcing from anthropogenic aerosols was roughly of the same magnitude (but of opposite sign) as the change in greenhouse gases throughout much of the twentieth century. Aerosols also represent the largest uncertainty in…
Effects of Warming and Stratospheric Aerosol Injection on Tropical Cyclone Distribution and Frequency in a High-Resolution Global Circulation Model
August 29, 2024
Andrew Feder
Tropical cyclones (TCs) occur stochastically in any given TC season, with varying numbers and intensities within basins over time. Nevertheless, they arise out of fundamental laws of thermodynamics and fluid physics, and in recent years, as global circulation models (GCMs) have increased in spatial resolution, increasingly realistic TCs and TC distributions have emerged from them. Where prior…
Radiative Feedbacks in Tropical Organized Convection and the Madden-Julian Oscillation
August 21, 2024
Wei-Ting Hsiao
The organization of tropical deep convection is supported by radiative feedbacks, in which high clouds and moisture anomalies associated with convection imposes anomalous longwave (LW) radiative heating in the atmosphere, further supporting convection. Despite an abundance of studies about numerical simulations, the interactions between tropical convective organization, radiative feedbacks, and…