NASA - NASA Mission Takes Stock of Earth's Melting Land Ice

NASA - NASA Mission Takes Stock of Earth's Melting Land Ice

Remember GRACE from class? The latest from the mission. Short story: melting, melting, and more melting.

Deep Time and Climate Change

One of the interesting things about studying Earth's past is just how tremendous the changes have been, and how much we can learn about the earth system by studying them.  In many cases they provide our only insight into what we can expect from future climate changes.  We can look at past forcings and responses in the earth system and ask what happens when the oceans become acidified, or when CO2 exceeds 400 ppm, or even more.

We spent some time talking about past climate change, but most of what we looked at was in the last 65 million years (myr).  This sounds like a long time, but it is just a hair over 1% of Earth's history. Check out this report from the National Academy of Science about climate change in deep time.  You can read it online below, or download the PDF.

Global Change in the Southeast

The United States Global Change Research Program published its scientific assessment of Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States in 2009.  It has a good overview of predicted regional changes.

One of the staggering predictions is that Wake Forest University will go from experiencing somewhere around 45 or so days exceeding 90 degrees F in a year to more than 100 days a year.  When you start to look at places like northern Florida and Texas, the numbers become hard to imagine, with temperatures predicted to be over 90 degrees for six months of the year.

Climate Wizard

One of the daunting things about working with climate change is just finding a way to get into the data.  Climate Wizard is an easy, map-based interface that lets you look at precipitation and temperature changes using the IPCC scenarios.  You can look at means or best and worst-case scenarios of the climate runs, anomalies, and at any area on the planet.  I have a feeling we might be using this one in class.

Also, EOS-Webster is the mother lode for earth science information.  Their climate change resources and visualizations are particularly good.

Climate Visualizations

There are a lot of great resources on the web that can help you understand climate.  Going straight to the sources of data, such as the Tropical Rainfall Monitoring Mission (TRMM) site is a great way to find data. [Note: loop this animation and  groove deeply on the annual cycle in precipitation--where is the ITCZ?  The monsoons?  Why is it raining over the Gulf Stream?  Where isn't it raining?]

NASA has focused a lot of effort on explaining the earth system, and they have dynamite overviews of things like radiation balance, aerosols, biogeochemical cycles, etc., at their website:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ .  (My lab had a hand in the Seeing the Forest for the Trees feature on forest carbon through our collaboration with Sassan Saatchi at JPL/CalTech.).  Or, go straight to the good stuff by looking at the figures generated from remotely sensed data. These are excellent visualizations of most of the climate parameters that we have talked about in class.You can get lost in these figures, and there are some great animations as well.  

Finally, catching up on ENSO from today's class, here is the NOAA information page on ENSO

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/enso.shtml

and this excellent visualization of SST anomalies and precipitation changes;

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/enso.php

Deforestation, Maya, and Climate Feedbacks

In class we've been learning about climate forcings and feedbacks, and we often think that these are effects that operate only at very large spatial scales.  But the Maya found out the hard way that human modification of landscapes has repercussions on the climate system.  Check out these results from a NASA climate simulation.  It shows how changing the land cover feeds back on the local climate system.  When you are looking at the figures and reading the explanations, think about things that we covered, like albedo, latent and sensible heat, transpiration, etc.  It will help reinforce the concepts we covered in class, and show how it matters in the real world.

Also, continuing on the forcings and feedback discussion that came up in class today about greenhouse gasses, here is a nice overview site of the roles of non-condensing greenhouse gasses, particularly CO2, in climate forcing, and water vapor and clouds as feedbacks.  Again, picking up on the material covered in class today, it shows how you can use climate models to perform virtual experiments on the earth system.  If you want to try this yourself, see the edGCM in the previous post.

edGCM: Climate Modeling for the rest of us

Hey guys, here is a link to edGCM, a climate model that runs on your laptop.  This might be a fun way to get predictions for species migration modeling if you wanted to incorporate your own scenarios, or look at species migrations during some climatic events in the past.  For example, what were predicted range shifts and extinction probabilities under some of the rapid climate change events of the Pleistocene (DO events, etc.)?  How does that compare with those predicted for this century?