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What is the influence of trends in solar output on the atmosphere and oceans?
Posted on August 3rd, 2009Categorized as Climate, Earth System Tagged as atmosphere, oceans, sun
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Because of the comparatively short period for which we have observations of the variations in the sun’s energy output, we have no reliable information of its longer-term trends and their probable effect on the earth’s temperature trends. Yet studies of indirect observations from Beryllium to numbers of sunspots suggest such and effect, despite present popular opinion derived from model experiments. How can we approach the problem in an objective manner?
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How to deal with the uncertainties associated with Earth system research, especially policy-relevant areas?
Posted on July 21st, 2009Categorized as Biodiversity, Earth System, Interdisciplinary, Social-Ecological Systems Tagged as atmosphere, land, oceans, uncertainties
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In addition to climate change uncertainties, we are still lack of knowledge about interactions of land-atmosphere, Atmosphere-sea, aerosol-climate, chemistry-climate, and more importantly human-environment relationships.
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What are the key regional drivers of future climate change?
Posted on July 24th, 2009Categorized as Other Tagged as atmosphere, climate change, forcing, land, oceans, regional impacts
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Globally, greenhouse gas forcing is the key driver in policy-relevent climate change (ie. over the next 20, 50, 100 years). Regionally -at the scales people live, ecosystems function, water is obtained and crops grown, other forcings can dominate. Land cover change, urbanization, industrial aerosols etc can all have regional fingerprints that while globally small are locally dominant. Other modes of variability, ocean-atmopshere coupling, land-atmopshere coupling, orographic effects etc all can be locally dominant drivers even if they are lost in any global measure of climate change. A research program to understand drivers of climate change at the scales that people live is hugely challenging at a scientific level, technical level for the modelling and in terms of research at the interface of risk and vulnerability.
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How extensive will be the reorganization of the planet’s climate system and northern ecosystems in response to an 80% loss in summer arctic sea ice cover over the next few decades?
Posted on August 3rd, 2009Categorized as Biodiversity, Earth System Tagged as Arctic sea ice, atmosphere, northern hemisphere
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Arctic sea ice loss is happening at least 30 years earlier than anticipated by the IPCC AR4 Report. The arctic ocean is gaining excess heat which is already being given back to the atmosphere in the autumn and thus changing the winds down into the northern mid-latitudes and the northern part of the earth’s heat engine. We have lost 40 % of summer sea ice already; this impact will only increase as we lose 80 % of the summer sea ice over the next few decades.
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How will the growing human population change the land cover (albedo), water and atmosphere composition in the next 20-50 years and what feedbacks will occur as symptoms of our planet resilience?
Posted on August 29th, 2009Categorized as Earth System, Social-Ecological Systems Tagged as atmosphere, creative strategies, feedbacks, land, livelihoods, population, resilience, water
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Feedbacks will create new conditions for our species that will have to evolve to adapt to polluted air, polluted water and a changed climate. The sooner we start paying attention to these feedbacks that will cause diseases, migrations, wars, famines, the sooner we can invest in creative strategies to improve or maintain human’s livelihoods and stop wasting time and energy on useless pursuits.
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How can we quantify the coupling of the diabatic radiative and diabatic precipitation forcing by clouds?
Posted on August 2nd, 2009Categorized as Climate, Earth System Tagged as atmosphere, diabatic forcing
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The diabatic forcing by clouds drive the vertical transports in the atmosphere, particularly in the tropics and the warm season; and establish the regional and tropical climate. Typically these diabatic terms have significant biases in models which bias the climate: hence these errors need to be evaluated against data and fixed.
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How will anthropogenic factors change local weather systems? Where are the areas most vulnerable to a change in the weather which could significantly affect the ability of their human population to survive?
Posted on July 19th, 2009Categorized as Climate, Social-Ecological Systems Tagged as anthropogenic factors, atmosphere, climate model, food, infrastructure, local weather system, oceans, weather, wildlife habitat
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Any change in the climate system will affect different areas to different extents. Some places (particularly in poorer countries) rely on growing food locally and do not have the infractructure to deal with large weather fluctuations. We need to understand how changes in large atmospheric and oceanic systems affect weather on smaller scales in order to provide support to those communities and protect nearby wildlife habitat.
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What is the global change impact on the upper atmosphere?
Posted on July 20th, 2009Categorized as Interdisciplinary Tagged as atmosphere, ozone depletion, space technology
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Well, it is not the most important question but after ozone depletion story on one hand and considering increasing dependence of society on space technologies including GPS this question must not be neglected.
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What kind of secure remediation can be used if carbon continues to rise in atmosphere?
Posted on July 20th, 2009Categorized as Earth System, Interdisciplinary Tagged as atmosphere, CO2, oceans
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The world is changing and, despite governments has adopting an ecologically suitable speech, not enough concrete attitudes have been taken to avoid global change. So, Scientist needs to search for a worst but necessary alternative: the remediation of the continuously increase of the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. There are propositions in this way, as enrich oceans with iron to increase grow of algae that will absorb carbon, but are these alternatives harmless? So, profoundly studies of these alternatives are imperative.
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How water is transformed globally between the ocean, land and the atmosphere?
Posted on July 20th, 2009Categorized as Earth System Tagged as atmosphere, oceans, precipitation, soil, water
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Water is the most important nature factor for human life. It influences the human life directly. It is also the main driver of the climate. Although we do not have the global water budget information yet, but very close to have it. What we need is from space to monitor globally the atmosphere water content, the ocean salinity, the precipitation, the land soil moisture, the ground water run off, the polar ice melt, the underground water distribution and variations. We already have GRACE mission to monitoring the underground water distribution and variations, the polar ice melting, SMOS mission and SMAP mission will be launched soon to monitoring the land soil moisture and ocean salinity, FY3 and other weather satellites to monitoring the atmosphere water content, etc. However, the data are not integrately studied together and a more complete constelation of these kinds of satellites with higher tempo resolution are needed if we want a complete answer of this question. A global cooperation with participation of many governments like US, Europe, Russia, China, Japan and India is necessary!
