This dissertation presents the results of statistical analyses of large climate datasets from two time intervals – the 20th century instrumental record and the proxy record of the last deglaciation – in order to understand the forcings and mechanisms of past climate variability.
A longstanding question in climate dynamics concerns...
Radiative feedbacks associated with changes in water vapor, temperature, surface albedo and clouds remain a major source of uncertainty in our understanding of climate's response to anthropogenic forcing. In this dissertation climate model data is used to investigate variations in feedbacks that result from changing CO₂ forcing and the time...
The Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) had as a primary objective
determining the radiative forcing due to anthropogenic aerosols over
climatologically significant space and time scales: the Indian Ocean during the
winter monsoon, January-March. During the winter monsoon, polluted, low-level
air from the Asian subcontinent blows over the Arabian Sea and...
Advanced Very-High Resolution Radiometer 4-km data were collected over the northeast Atlantic for May-August, 1995-1999. Aerosol optical depth was retrieved in cloud-free pixels. In pixels containing clouds from only single-layered, low-level systems, a retrieval scheme that accounts for partly-cloudy pixels was used to retrieve: cloud optical depth, droplet effective radius,...
In a steady state, the Earth's absorbed solar radiation (ASR) balances the outgoing
longwave radiation (OLR) at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). In response to a radiative
forcing, that is, an external perturbation to the top of the atmosphere energy balance, the
Earth's climate system adjusts until reaching a...