AGU Annual Fall Meeting, San Francisco, California, December 5-9, 2005
November 30, 2005
This year's Fall AGU meeting has a strong component focused on aerosols, global change and the role of space-based observations in determining both. Sessions include: Full Story

Paper on improvements to representations of clouds and radiation in a global climate model accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres
November 22, 2005
The paper entitled "Performance of two cloud-radiation parameterization schemes in the fvGCM for anomalously wet May and June 2003 over the continental United States and Amazonia" by Yogesh Sud, David Mocko, (Climate & Radiation Branch) & Shian-Jiann Lin (NOAA-GFDL), quantitatively evaluated the two schemes as compared to observed precipitation, radiation, and upper-air features. The two schemes examined were (1) the McRAS (Microphysics of clouds with Relaxed Arakawa-Schubert) cloud scheme with Chou et al. radiation scheme (both developed within the Climate and Radiation Branch), and (2) the cloud and radiation schemes found in the NCAR-CCM3. Full Story

New Opportunity for Sun-Earth Climate Study
November 16, 2005
Before the end of the next decade, NASA astronauts will again return to the surface of the Earth’s Moon. Recently teams at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., and Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., were selected to lead in the development of a lunar lander spacecraft.The return to the Moon provides great opportunities to advance Sun-Earth climate research. The Moon was likely born at an early stage of solar system formation. Variations of solar electromagnetic radiation associated with solar activity cause variations in lunar surface temperature that slowly propagate downward beneath the lunar surface. Hence borehole temperature profiles may be used to reconstruct the long history of solar variability. Full Story

MILAGRO/INTEX-B Joint Science Team Meetings held in Boulder, Colorado
November 8, 2005
Allen Chu of JCET/UMBC and Charles Gatebe of GEST/UMBC and the Climate and Radiation Branch attended the MILAGRO/INTEX-B Joint Science Team Meetings in Boulder, Colorado, October 24-28, 2005. The MILAGRO/INTEX-B (Part I) field experiment will take place in March 2006, focusing on pollution outflow from Mexico City. INTEX-B (Part II) will be held three weeks later from mid-April to mid-May 2006, focusing on Asian outflow over the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Full Story