Planetary Climate Dynamics

Abstract:

An extremely bright storm system observed in Uranus' atmosphere by amateur observers in September 2014 triggered an international campaign to observe this feature with many telescopes across the world. Observations of the storm system in the near infrared were acquired in October and November 2014 with SINFONI on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. SINFONI is an Integral Field Unit spectrometer returning 64. ×. 64 pixel images with 2048 wavelengths and uses adaptive optics. Image cubes in the H-band (1.43-1.87. μm) were obtained at spatial resolutions of ~0.1″ per pixel. The observations show that the centre of the storm feature shifts markedly with increasing altitude, moving in the retrograde direction and slightly poleward with increasing altitude. We also see a faint 'tail' of more reflective material to the immediate south of the storm, which again trails in the retrograde direction. The observed spectra were analysed with the radiative transfer and retrieval code, NEMESIS (Irwin et al. [2008]. J. Quant. Spec. Radiat. Transfer, 109, 1136-1150). We find that the storm is well-modelled using either two main cloud layers of a 5-layer aerosol model based on Sromovsky et al. (Sromovsky et al. [2011]. Icarus, 215, 292-312) or by the simpler two-cloud-layer model of Tice et al. (Tice et al. [2013]. Icarus, 223, 684-698). The deep component appears to be due to a brightening (i.e. an increase in reflectivity) and increase in altitude of the main tropospheric cloud deck at 2-3. bars for both models, while the upper component of the feature was modelled as being due to either a thickening of the tropospheric haze of the 2-layer model or a vertical extension of the upper tropospheric cloud of the 5-layer model, assumed to be composed of methane ice and based at the methane condensation level of our assumed vertical temperature and abundance profile at 1.23. bar. We also found this methane ice cloud to be responsible for the faint 'tail' seen to the feature's south and the brighter polar 'hood' seen in all observations polewards of ~45°N for the 5-layer model. During the twelve days between our sets of observations the higher-altitude component of the feature was observed to have brightened significantly and extended to even higher altitudes, while the deeper component faded.

Abstract:

A series of rotating, thermal convection experiments were carried out on the Coriolis platform in Grenoble, France, to investigate the formation and energetics of systems of zonal jets through nonlinear eddy/wave-zonal flow interactions on a topographic ß-plane. The latterwas produced by a combination of a rigid, conically sloping bottom and the rotational deformation of the free upper surface. Convection was driven by a system of electrical heaters laid under the (thermally conducting) sloping bottom and led to the production of intense, convective vortices. These were observed to grow in size as each experiment proceeded and led to the development of weak but clear azimuthal jet-like flows, with a radial scale that varied according to the rotation speed of the platform. Detailed analyses reveal that the kinetic energy-weighted radial wavenumber of the zonal jets, kJ y, scales quite closely either with the Rhines wavenumber as kJ y ≃ 2(βT/2urms)^1/2, where urms is the rms total or eddy velocity and βT is the vorticity gradient produced by the sloping topography, or the anisotropy wavenumber as kJ y ≃ 1.25(β³T ε{lunate})^1/5, where ε{lunate} is the upscale turbulent energy transfer rate. Jets are primarily produced by the direct quasi-linear action of horizontal Reynolds stresses produced by trains of topographic Rossby waves. The nonlinear production rate of zonal kinetic energy is found to be strongly unsteady, however, with fluctuations of order 10-100 times the amplitude of the mean production rate for all cases considered. The time scale of such fluctuations is found to scale consistently with either an inertial time scale, Τp ~ 1.√urms βT, or the Ekman spin-down time scale. Kinetic energy spectra show some evidence for a k^-5/3 inertial subrange in the isotropic component, suggestive of a classical Kolmogorov-Batchelor-Kraichnan upscale energy cascade and a steeper spectrum in the zonal mean flow, though not as steep as k^-5, as anticipated for fully zonostrophic flow. This is consistent with a classification of all of these flows as marginally zonostrophic, as expected for values of the zonostrophy parameter Rβ ≃ 1.6-1.7, though a number of properties related to flow anisotropy were found to vary significantly and systematically within this range.

Abstract:

© 2015 The Authors. Improving the late Quaternary paleoclimate record through climate interpretations of low-latitude glacier length changes advances our understanding of past climate change events and the mechanisms for past, present, and future climate change. Paleotemperature reconstructions at low-latitude glaciers are uniquely fruitful because they can provide both site-specific information and enhanced understanding of regional-scale variations due to the structure of the tropical atmosphere. We produce Little Ice Age (LIA) and Younger Dryas (YD) paleoclimate reconstructions for the Huancané outlet glacier of the Quelccaya Ice Cap (QIC) and low-latitude southern hemisphere regional sea surface temperatures (SSTs) using a coupled ice-flow and energy balance model. We also model the effects of long-term changes in the summit temperature and precipitiation rate and the effects of interannual climate variability on the Huancané glacier length. We find temperature to be the dominant climate driver of glacier length change. Also, we find that interannual climate variability cannot adequately explain glacier advances inferred from the geomorphic record, necessitating that these features were formed during past colder climates. To constrain our LIA reconstruction, we incorporate the QIC ice core record, finding a LIA air temperature cooling at the ice cap of between ~0.7 °C and ~1.1 °C and ~0.4 °C and regional SSTs cooling of ~0.6 °C. For the YD paleoclimate reconstructions, we propose two limits on the precipitation rate, since the ice core record does not extend into the Pleistocene: 1) the precipitation rate scales with the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship (upper limit on cooling) and 2) the precipitation rate increases by 40% (lower limit on cooling), which is an increase about twice as great as the regional increases realized in GCM simulations for the period. The first limit requires ~1.6 °C cooling in ice cap air temperatures and ~0.9 °C cooling in SSTs, and the second limit requires ~1.0 °C cooling in ice cap air temperatures and ~0.5 °C cooling in SSTs. Our temperature reconstructions are in good agreement with the magnitude and trend of GCM simulations that incorporate the forcing mechanisms hypothesized to have caused these climate change events.

Abstract:

We model the atmospheres and spectra of Earth-like planets orbiting the entire grid of M dwarfs for active and inactive stellar models with T_eff = 2300 K to T_eff = 3800 K and for six observed MUSCLES M dwarfs with UV radiation data. We set the Earth-like planets at the 1 AU equivalent distance and show spectra from the visible to IR (0.4–20 μm) to compare detectability of features in different wavelength ranges with the James Webb Space Telescope and other future ground- and spaced-based missions to characterize exo-Earths. We focus on the effect of UV activity levels on detectable atmospheric features that indicate habitability on Earth, namely, H₂O, O₃, CH₄, N₂O, and CH₃Cl. To observe signatures of life—O₂/O₃ in combination with reducing species like CH₄—we find that early and active M dwarfs are the best targets of the M star grid for future telescopes. The O₂ spectral feature at 0.76 μm is increasingly difficult to detect in reflected light of later M dwarfs owing to low stellar flux in that wavelength region. N₂O, another biosignature detectable in the IR, builds up to observable concentrations in our planetary models around M dwarfs with low UV flux. CH₃Cl could become detectable, depending on the depth of the overlapping N₂O feature. We present a spectral database of Earth-like planets around cool stars for directly imaged planets as a framework for interpreting future light curves, direct imaging, and secondary eclipse measurements of the atmospheres of terrestrial planets in the habitable zone to design and assess future telescope capabilities.

Abstract:

An analysis of the climate impact of various forms of beef production is carried out, with a particular eye to the comparison between systems relying primarily on grasses grown in pasture (‘grass-fed’ or ‘pastured’beef) and systems involving substantial use of manufactured feed requiring significant external inputs in the form of synthetic fertilizer and mechanized agriculture (‘feedlot’beef). The climate impact is evaluated without employing metrics such asCO e 2 or global warming potentials. The analysis evaluates the impact at all time scales out to 1000 years. It is concluded that certain forms of pastured beef production have substantially lower climate impact than feedlot systems. However, pastured systems that require significant synthetic fertilization, inputs from supplemental feed, or deforestation to create pasture, have substantially greater climate impact at all time scales than the feedlot and dairy-associated systems analyzed. Even the best pastured system analyzed has enough climate impact to justify efforts to limit future growth of beef production, which in any event would be necessary if climate and other ecological concerns were met by a transition to primarily pasture-based systems. Alternate mitigation options are discussed, but barring unforseen technological breakthroughs worldwide consumption at current North American per capita rates appears incompatible with a 2 °C warming target.