ClimaTea Journal Club: "Warming effect of clouds on snowball Earth"

Date: 

Tuesday, October 7, 2014, 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Location: 

HUCE Seminar Room
GS Leah Birch will be presenting the attached two papers, and her summary is below:
Clouds have a two-fold effect in the atmosphere, as they promote both cooling and heating. Due to their size, they are often a great source of uncertainty in GCMs, so it is important to look at results critically. This week I will focus on the warming effect that clouds may have in the context of deglaciation from a Snowball Earth. We will discuss two papers by Abbot et. al. (2012) and Abbot (2014) in an effort to understand the heating ability of clouds and the limitations we think are present in the GCMs used. We will examine the differences of cloud-resolving models versus cloud parameterizations in Abbot et. al. (2012), followed by taking a closer look at the results of a cloud-resolving model in Abbot (2014).
abbot_et_al_2012.pdf206 KB
abbot_2014.pdf1.06 MB