The study of Earth's atmosphere and its processes, including meteorology, climatology, atmospheric chemistry, air quality, weather prediction, and the impacts of human activities on atmospheric composition
9 papersSatellite data reveals that the Earth's storm cloud zones have been shrinking over the past 24 years, and this contraction is the main driver of the observed increase in sunlight absorption by the Earth. This decrease in cloud cover allows more solar radiation to reach the Earth's surface, which in turn influences the Earth's energy balance.
This study found that shifts in stratospheric wind patterns, specifically a slowdown in the Brewer-Dobson Circulation, are a primary cause of the observed warming over the Southern Hemisphere and cooling over Antarctica from 2002-2022, masking the expected warming from ozone recovery. By accounting for these circulation changes, the authors reveal a warming trend over Antarctica consistent with ozone healing.
This study found that during the mid-Holocene, precipitation from the Mediterranean Sea, driven by northerly winds, filled crater lakes in the Tibesti mountains, even though it's in the Sahara Desert. The Trou au Natron lake was much larger than the Era Kohor lake due to the mountains enhancing rainfall in the north, and winds blowing moisture away from the south.
This study challenges the conventional understanding of the greenhouse effect, arguing that the Earth's atmosphere doesn't function like a greenhouse and that water vapor is the primary driver of atmospheric warming, not carbon dioxide. The authors propose replacing "greenhouse gas" with "radiatively active gas" and "greenhouse effect" with "atmospheric radiative effect." However, they rely on theoretical arguments and reinterpretation of existing data, without presenting new empirical findings to support their claims. They also assume isothermal atmosphere at equilibrium, contradicting observed atmospheric conditions.
This study uses observations and climate model simulations to show that tropical cyclone clusters are increasing in the North Atlantic and decreasing in the western North Pacific, largely due to warming ocean temperatures and changes in large-scale atmospheric wave patterns. The study develops a probabilistic model that identifies dynamically connected tropical cyclone clusters and attributes the shift in cluster hotspots to a La Niña-like global warming pattern.
A climate model successfully predicted about 75% of the record-breaking global temperature increase observed in 2023. The study identified the transition to El Niño and increased absorbed shortwave radiation in the Northern Hemisphere during spring and summer as key drivers of the warming.
Pangu-Weather, a new AI weather forecasting system, uses 3D neural networks and a hierarchical temporal aggregation strategy to produce more accurate medium-range forecasts than the leading traditional numerical weather prediction method. Tested on 39 years of global data, it demonstrates faster performance and better accuracy in tracking tropical cyclones, but relies on reanalysis data for training and testing.
ERA5-Land shows improved performance in simulating soil moisture, snow depth, and river discharge compared to ERA5 and ERA-Interim, but energy flux estimations present modest improvements. Higher resolution matters and significantly contributes to a more accurate representation of the hydrological cycle, particularly in complex terrains.
The article reviews the current state of knowledge on the acidity of particles and cloud droplets in the atmosphere. Observationally constrained pH estimates indicate that fine particles are ubiquitous but spatially and temporally limited, while clouds and fogs are also generally acidic.