The Psychics of Physics
Published:
A fun article on NYU’s new Greene supercomputer and how it allows us to explore climate change came out in NYU IT’s Download Newsletter.
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The double dip gap in ozone trends over the high latitudes
Published:
Aaron Match submitted our work exploring a curious feature of extratropical ozone in simulations of global warming.
A pure QBO and its intereraction with the annual cycle
Published:
Claire Valva submitted a paper drawing on techniques from dynamical systems analysis to better define and understand the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation. Koopman methods are built for identifying nearly periodic behavior in chaotic systems. We applied it to zonal winds in the tropical stratosphere to objectively identify the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation.
Stressed out jet streams!
Published:
Xingjian (Ken) Yan, a precocious undergraduate (now bound for a PhD at MIT) working with Lei Wang and I just submitted a paper exploring the utility of the traffic jam theory of blocking onset for perdiction to Geophysical Research Letters. Ken defined and explored “flux exceedance events”, meteorological situations where the jet stream gets overloaded with storm activity. Nakamura and Huang suggested that this overloaded jet situation creates a pile up storm activity – a traffic jam – leading to blocking events. Ken found that the climatological structure of exceedance events is remarkably similar to that of blocks, but that they appear to be distinct phenomenon: an overloaded jet stream is unfortunately not a reliable harbinger of an atmospheric block.
Protection without poison
Published:
Aaron Match developed a new theory for why the ozone layer is up in the stratosphere, reaching a maximum 26 km above the surface in paper submitted to the journal of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. In 1880, Walter Hartley deduced that ozone must be absorbing UV-B and UV-C radiation from the sun, but since it isn’t present at the surface (except in polluted air), this ozone must be somewhere “up there”. The stratosphere wasn’t discovered for a couple more decades, but it turns out that ozone that shields us from this harmful UV radiation is largely between 16 and 40 km above us. It’s a good thing its there: ozone is toxic. If it were uniformly distributed through the atmosphere, the concentration at the surface would be 8 times the EPA safety limit. Why is ozone safely up in the stratosphere, where it protects us without poisoning us? Advanced chemistry climate models can accurately predict the distribution of ozone, but in turns out our text book understanding of the ozone layer were incomplete and gave the wrong explanation for why it reaches a maximum in the stratosphere at 26 km.
