ClimaTea Journal Club

Date: 

Tuesday, February 6, 2018, 3:00pm

Location: 

Seminar Room MCZ, 429

Speaker: Feng Ding

Feng is going to lead a discussion on: "Conceptual models of planetary climate".

Here are Feng's thoughts on this discussion:

"Tens of exoplanets have been confirmed in the habitable zone around their stars, in the sense that liquid water ocean could be supported at the surface. Current observation techniques only provide estimates on the masses and radii of those planets but the atmospheric properties are barely characterized. In this Letter, Pierrehumbert discusses a range of possible climates for Gliese 581g and detections of those climate states, ranging from the airless solution to the "Eyeball" solution. Although this planet later proved to be a false positive due to the misinterpretation of the observation, his discussions and fundamental insights based on simple theories and physical models apply to the entire class of M dwarf super-Earths that share similar parameters near the outer regions of the habitable zone, including Proxima Centauri b discovered in 2016, and TRAPPIST-1e discovered in 2017."

pierrehumbert_2011_apjl_726_l8.pdf210 KB