The evaluation and improvement of radiative transfer calculations are essential to attain improved performance of general circulation models (GCMs) for climate change applications. A Quality Measurement Experiment (QME) is being conducted to analyze the spectral residuals between the downwelling longwave radiance measured by the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferomete...

• Although there is a worldwide surge of interest in conservation, many justifications rest on shaky or ephemeral grounds. • Arguments for conservation of biodiversity often include strong ethical or aesthetic components which are superficially attractive but depend on potentially changeable social circumstances. • Economic justifications based on undiscovered potential are susceptible to chang...

Global climate model simulations are influenced by the explicit or parameterized physical processes that they include. Most climate models have some representation of sea ice in the polar regions, which contributes to ice-albedo feedback and a dramatic increase in climate change in the polar regions. Some sea ice components of coupled climate models have been improved in recent years to include...

[1] The key factors contributing to the formation and maintenance of the recently discovered extra-tropical tropopause inversion layer are presently unclear. In this study, it is shown that such a layer can form as a consequence of the turbulent dynamics of synoptic-scale baroclinic eddies alone, in the absence of explicitly parameterized, small-scale, radiative-convective processes. A simple g...

The goal of the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA) program is to gain knowledge of the important physical processes in, below, and above sea ice in order to improve their representation in global climate models. In order to provide the community with a test bed for evaluating sea ice model components, we are attempting to make accurate estimates of the thickness distribution for th...