Atmosphere Archives

Figure showing distribution of the March total column ozone in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics for (a, c) long-term mean (climatology) and (b, d) Arctic ozone loss events.

Arctic Ozone Loss Brings Warming to the Near Surface

by Yan Xia 11 May 202226 April 2022

New research confirms that ozone loss over the Arctic can lead to widespread warming near the Artic surface during late winter and early spring.

Two figures from the paper, showing the orbit path of Ice in the Mesosphere and graph showing the agreement of the daily PMC occurrence rates of the simultaneous observations from Himawari-8/AHI and AIM/Cloud Imaging and Particle Size data..

Editors' Highlights

New Technique Improves Polar Mesospheric Cloud Data Set

by Astrid Maute 7 April 20225 April 2022

A new two-step Polar Mesospheric Cloud detection technique is applied towards the Himawari-8/Advanced Himawari Imager full-disk images leading to a new high-quality dataset.

Plot showing how the height of melting layer is higher than that of the freezing level in cyclones.

Editors' Highlights

Melting Layer Characteristics of Cyclones

by Jonathan H. Jiang 22 March 202221 March 2022

Dual‐frequency Precipitation Radar observations reveal the characteristics and microphysical processes of the melting layer in cyclone precipitation over the western North Pacific.

Photograph of the the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica

Editors' Vox

Modeling Forest-Atmosphere Exchange

by A. Robert MacKenzie and Edward J. Bannister 11 February 202210 February 2022

Studying the interactions between the atmosphere and forests is a key component of understanding forest ecosystems and the interplay between our atmosphere and the living world.

Series of charts from the paper by Feng et al.

Editors' Highlights

A New Way to Represent Microphysical Uncertainty

by Jiwen Fan 2 November 20211 November 2021

A new way of representing microphysical uncertainty in convective-scale data assimilation reduces biases in model states and improves the accuracy of short-term precipitation forecasts.

Set of four maps showing condensed water path, frozen moist static energy anomaly, longwave heating anomaly, and shortwave heating anomaly from the 300 K sea surface temperature simulation at day 100.

Editors' Highlights

Importance of High Clouds and Moisture in Rainstorm Aggregation

by Jiwen Fan 21 October 202115 October 2021

A study of the impacts of radiative interactions with different cloud types on aggregation of rainstorms finds that interactions with high-clouds and water vapor are key.

Two graphs showing monthly mean multi-model mean shortwave flux biases over ocean and land.

Editors' Highlights

AeroCom Models Improved with Aerosol and Albedo Constraints

by Jiwen Fan 20 October 202115 October 2021

Satellite data has been used to correct the aerosol loading and land surface albedo in several AeroCom models, which has improved shortwave flux biases between models and observations.

Plots showing the precipitation errors using the new error metric as a function of absolute errors.

Editors' Highlights

Uncovering Hidden Errors in Simulated Precipitation

by Jiwen Fan 18 October 202115 October 2021

New metrics used to quantify errors in precipitation show that convection permitting simulations outperform coarser resolution simulations.

An image of Naito Parkway in Portland, Ore., during the COVID-19 pandemic

Research Spotlights

Did the Drop in COVID-Related Emissions Affect the Climate?

by Kate Wheeling 4 May 202128 September 2021

Global emissions dropped markedly in 2020, due in large part to lockdowns that slowed economic and social activity, but the climate likely won’t be noticeably affected.