Climate Variability and Trends Research
Understanding
past climate changes is an essential prerequisite for predicting
and projecting future changes. Since the 1970's, work at NOAA's
Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) has aimed to determine what the data
records tell us about past climate change signals and how well climate
models simulate the observed historical changes.
An
essential first step is understanding the quality of data records.
For more than a decade, ARL has worked with radiosonde (weather
balloon) data to understand, document, and, when possible, make
adjustments for artificial abrupt changes in upper-air temperature
and humidity observations. In the early 1990's, efforts focused
on gathering radiosonde station history information. More recent
efforts have aimed to produce datasets with reduced inhomogeneities
and to compare alternative adjusted datasets to assess remaining
uncertainties. Using these and other in situ datasets, past work
has investigated:
- Surface
and upper-air temperature and humidity (Free
and Seidel 2005, Fu
et al. 2004, Lanzante
et al. 2003, Levitus et al. 2001, Ramaswamy et al. 2001, Ross
et al. 2002, Santer
et al. 2005, Shine et al. 2001, Seidel
et al. 2004), and clouds (Seidel
and Durre 2003, Sun et al. 2007)
- The
Arctic Oscillation and the polar vortex (Angell
2006, Li and Wang 2003)
- The
Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (Angell
2001, Seidel
et al. 2004)
- Extremes
of temperature and humidity, and heat wave occurences (Gaffen
and Ross 1998, Wang and Gaffen 2001)
- Climatology
and variability of the tropical tropopause (Randel
et al. 2000, Seidel
et al. 2001)
- Effects
of volcanoes on climate (Free
and Angell 2002)
- Variability
and trends in tropical available potential energy (CAPE) and in
the potential intensity of hurricanes
(Gettelman
et al. 2002, Free
et al. 2004)
- Relationships
between temperature changes over mountain locations and in the
free troposphere
(Seidel
and Free 2003, Pepin
and Seidel 2005)
- The
diurnal cycle in upper-air temperature (Seidel
et al. 2005)
- Changes
in tropospheric and stratospheric ozone
(Angell 1998)
Current
projects also include investigations of:
-
Changes in global tropopause height and temperature
(Seidel
and Randel 2006)
-
Climatology and trends in the planetary boundary layer
- Comparisons
between observed and modeled changes in the vertical temperature
profile
The
links above are to recent publications. Earlier papers can also
be found on our Publications page.
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