Arctic clouds modulate the surface radiation budget by emitting longwave radiation and reflecting incident shortwave radiation. The Arctic is characterized by high levels of anthropogenic pollution that commonly forms a haze in winter and spring, due to long-range transport of aerosols primarily from Eastern Europe and Russia (Sirois and Barrie, 1999). During the Arctic winter and spring strong...

In this paper, time extension methods, originally designed for clear-sky land surface conditions, are used to estimate high-spatial resolution daily longwave (LW) radiation from the instantaneous Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) product. The performance of four methods were first tested by using ground based flux measurements that collected 141 global sites. Combined with accuracy LW estim...

SouthernWest Africa (SWA) has a large population that relies on highly variablemonsoon rainfall, yet climate models show little consensus over projected precipitation in this region. Understanding of the current and future climate of SWA is further complicated by rapidly increasing anthropogenic emissions and a lack of surface observations. Using multiple satellite observations, the ERA-Interim...

Through partial bleaching of both visual pigment extracts and cell suspensions we show that the deep-sea stomiid Malacosteus niger, which produces far red bioluminescence, has two visual pigments within its retina which form a rhodopsin/porphyropsin pigment pair with lambda max values around 520 and 540 nm, but lacks the very longwave sensitive visual pigments (lambda max > 550 nm) observed in ...

[1] We explore the daily evolution of tropical intraseasonal oscillations in satellite-observed tropospheric temperature, precipitation, radiative fluxes, and cloud properties. The warm/rainy phase of a composited average of fifteen oscillations is accompanied by a net reduction in radiative input into the ocean-atmosphere system, with longwave heating anomalies transitioning to longwave coolin...

[1] Clear-sky longwave radiative feedback processes depicted in climate models prepared for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) are investigated using satellite observations of the clear-sky outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). Estimates of clear-sky longwave radiative damping are derived from regional, seasonal, and interannual sources of variabili...

Arctic sea ice is retreating rapidly, raising prospects of a future ice-free Arctic Ocean during summer. Because climate-model simulations of the sea-ice loss differ substantially, we used a robust linear relationship between monthly-mean September sea-ice area and cumulative carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to infer the future evolution of Arctic summer sea ice directly from the observational re...

Estimates are made of the effect of changes in tropospheric water vapor on the climate sensitivity to doubled carbon dioxide (CO2), using a coarse resolution atmospheric general circulation model coupled to a slab mixed layer ocean. The sensitivity of the model to doubled CO2 is found as the difference between the equilibrium responses for control and doubled CO2 cases. Clouds are specified to ...