Related papers: Earth's Energy Imbalance and Implications
Standard solar models predict a solar luminosity that gradually increased by about 30% over the past 4.5 billion years. Under the faint sun, Earth should have been frozen solid for most of its existence. Yet, running water is observed to…
Phase transitions of atmospheric water play a ubiquitous role in the Earth's climate system, but their direct impact on atmospheric dynamics has escaped wide attention. Here we examine and advance a theory as to how condensation influences…
Destabilization of the water cycle threatens human lives and livelihoods. Meanwhile our understanding of whether and how changes in vegetation cover could trigger abrupt transitions in moisture regimes remains incomplete. This challenge…
The potential habitability of an exoplanet is traditionally assessed by determining if its orbit falls within the circumstellar `habitable zone' of its star, defined as the distance at which water could be liquid on the surface of a planet…
The forcings due to changing concentrations of Earth's five most important, naturally occurring greenhouse gases, H$_2$O, CO$_2$, O$_3$, N$_2$O and CH$_4$ as well as CF$_4$ and SF$_6$ were evaluated for the case of a cloud-free atmosphere.…
The ice-albedo feedback is a potentially important de-stabilizing effect for the climate of terrestrial planets. It is based on the positive feedback between decreasing surface temperatures, an increase of snow and ice cover and an…
This thesis assesses the influence of astronomical phenomena on the Earth's biosphere and climate. I examine in particular the relevance of both the path of the Sun through the Galaxy and the evolution of the Earth's orbital parameters in…
Earth's climate can be understood as a dynamical system that changes due to external forcing and internal couplings. Essential climate variables, such as surface air temperature, describe this dynamics. Our current interglacial, the…
The joint effect of gravity and thermal misbalance on the dynamics of acoustic-gravity waves (AGW) in the solar atmosphere is considered. It is shown that the heating and cooling taken in the form of power functions lead to the linear…
The climate system's nonlinear dynamics is influenced by various external forcings and internal feedbacks that can give rise to regional and even global tipping points that may lead to significant and potentially irreversible changes.…
Recent studies have shown that ocean dynamics can have a significant warming effect on the permanent night sides of 1 to 1 tidally locked terrestrial exoplanets with Earth-like atmospheres and oceans in the middle of the habitable zone.…
We assess the dependence of Earth's disk-integrated mid-infrared thermal emission spectrum on observation geometries and investigate which and how spectral features are impacted by seasonality on Earth. We compiled an exclusive dataset…
The climate and circulation of a terrestrial planet are governed by, among other things, the distance to its host star, its size, rotation rate, obliquity, atmospheric composition and gravity. Here we explore the effects of the last of…
We seek to model the coupled evolution of a planet and a civilization through the era when energy harvesting by the civilization drives the planet into new and adverse climate states. In this way we ask if triggering "anthropocenes" of the…
Current understanding suggests that as the Sun brightens in the far future, Earth's carbonate-silicate cycle will offset increasing temperatures by drawing CO$_2$ out of the atmosphere, ultimately leading to the extinction of all…
Earth's modern atmosphere is highly oxygenated and is a remotely detectable signal of its surface biosphere. However, the lifespan of oxygen-based biosignatures in Earth's atmosphere remains uncertain, particularly for the distant future.…
Using the Community Earth System Model, with the Community Atmosphere Model version 5.3, we investigate the cloud radiative effects of anthropogenic aerosols emitted from different source regions and global shipping. We also analyse aerosol…
The aim of this paper is to provide geoscientists with the most accurate set of the Earth's astro-climatic parameters and daily insolation quantities, able to describe the Short-Term Orbital Forcing (STOF) as represented by the…
The Sun is expected to increase its radiant output by about 10% per billion years. The rate at which the radius of the Earth's orbit would need to increase in order to keep the present value of the Sun's radiant flux at the Earth constant…
Despite a fainter Sun, the surface of the early Earth was mostly ice-free. Proposed solutions to this so-called "faint young Sun problem" have usually involved higher amounts of greenhouse gases than present in the modern-day atmosphere.…